The year in prizes
1934 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Caroline Miller won the Pulitzer for Lamb in His Bosom, a novel of backwoods Georgia before the Civil War. Luigi Pirandello won the Nobel, and Cornelia Meigs took the Newbery Medal for Invincible Louisa, her life of Louisa May Alcott.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Lamb in His Bosom
Cean Carver marries Lonzo Smith and moves to his land in the wiregrass country of south Georgia, a day's journey from her mother, in the decades...
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The People's Choice
Herbert Agar's The People's Choice examines the American presidency from George Washington through Warren Harding, treating each administration...
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John Hay
Tyler Dennett, a historian of American foreign relations in Asia, gave his biography of John Hay the subtitle From Poetry to Politics, tracing a...
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Collected Verse
The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer gathers more than a decade of his poetry into a single retrospective volume, and it stands, deliberately, as...
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Invincible Louisa
Cornelia Meigs traces Louisa May Alcott's life from her childhood in Pennsylvania and later Massachusetts, raised in near constant poverty by her...
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Six Characters in Search of an Author
A theater company is in the middle of rehearsing an ordinary play when six strangers walk in and interrupt, announcing that they are unfinished...
What Shaped 1934
The Dust Bowl reached its worst in 1934 as topsoil from the plains blew as far as Washington and New York. Prize winning fiction that year was set among poor rural people, which was where the country's attention had gone. Pirandello's Nobel honored a playwright who had spent his career dismantling the idea of a stable self, and whose Six Characters in Search of an Author had shown a generation of dramatists that a play could be about its own machinery.
Published in 1934, 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 selectionMurder on the Orient Express
Snowbound between Vinkovci and Brod after the Orient Express plows into a drift, detective Hercule Poirot is asked to investigate the murder of an...
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Curated selectionTender Is the Night
Psychiatrist Dick Diver marries Nicole Warren, a wealthy patient he treated for a breakdown rooted in childhood trauma, and the two become the...