The year in prizes
1933 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
T. S. Stribling won the Pulitzer for The Store. Ivan Bunin took the Nobel and became the first Russian writer to win it, receiving the prize as an exile in France, and Frederick Jackson Turner was honored for his work on American sectionalism.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Store
Miltiades Vaiden was a colonel in the Confederate army and a Klan leader during Reconstruction, and by 1884, when the novel opens, he is a poor...
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The Significance of Sections in American History
The Significance of Sections in American History collects and extends the argument Frederick Jackson Turner had been developing for decades as a...
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Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage
Allan Nevins builds his life of Grover Cleveland around a single argument stated plainly in the subtitle, that Cleveland's blunt, often politically...
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Conquistador
Conquistador is a long narrative poem narrated by the aging conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who fought under Hernan Cortes during the...
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Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze
Thirteen year old Yuin Fah, called Young Fu, arrives in the river city of Chungking with his widowed mother, who apprentices him to Tang Yu Shu, a...
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The Life of Arseniev
Alexei Arseniev narrates his own life from earliest childhood on a declining Russian country estate through his slow, halting discovery that he...
What Shaped 1933
Roosevelt took office in March 1933 and the New Deal began within days, while in Germany Hitler became chancellor in January and the first camps opened by spring. Bunin's Nobel was explicitly political in effect if not in wording: the Soviet Union treated the award to an emigre as an insult, which it partly was. Turner's history, arguing that America is best understood as a set of competing regions rather than one nation, was published as the federal government began reaching into those regions on an unprecedented scale.
Published in 1933, never won a Pulitzer or Booker
These come from our Never Won a Pulitzer or Booker collection, which explains which prizes we count and the retrospective exception for Fahrenheit 451.
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Curated selectionLost Horizon
British consul Hugh Conway is one of four passengers evacuated by aircraft from the city of Baskul during a local uprising, along with the younger...
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Curated selectionTestament of Youth
Vera Brittain leaves Oxford's Somerville College in 1915 to serve as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, tending wounded soldiers in London, on...