The year in prizes

1935 Book Award Winners

5 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection

Josephine Winslow Johnson won the Pulitzer for Now in November at the age of twenty four, still the youngest winner of the fiction prize. Douglas S. Freeman took the biography award for R. E. Lee, and Monica Shannon won the Newbery Medal for Dobry.

Winners

In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson
A family of five moves onto a mortgaged farm at the start of the Depression, and one of the three daughters tells you, from the November at the far...
Pulitzer Prize for History

The Colonial Period of American History by Charles McLean Andrews
Charles McLean Andrews built The Colonial Period of American History as a four volume history of the English colonies from their founding through...
Pulitzer Prize for Biography

R. E. Lee by Douglas S. Freeman
Douglas Southall Freeman spent years of research, including interviews with surviving members of Lee's own army and deep study of West Point and...
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Bright Ambush by Audrey Wurdemann
Bright Ambush, published in 1934, collects the poems of a poet still in her early twenties at the time of writing, and it turns over love,...
Newbery Medal

Dobry by Monica Shannon
Dobry grows up on a small farm in a Bulgarian village, helping his widowed mother and his grandfather work the land the way farming families in the...

What Shaped 1935

Now in November is a Depression novel written while the Depression was happening, the story of a family losing a farm through drought and debt, told by a daughter who can see it coming and cannot stop it. Johnson was writing about the present rather than looking back at it, which is rarer in prize lists than it sounds. Freeman's four volume life of Lee, meanwhile, was the fullest expression yet of a view of the Confederacy that later historians would spend decades complicating.

Published in 1935, 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.

Curated selection

Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
William Bradshaw, an Englishman teaching in Berlin, meets Arthur Norris on a train crossing into Germany, an ill fitting wigged gentleman traveling...
Curated selection

Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
Danny, a young paisano just home from the First World War, unexpectedly inherits two small houses in Monterey's Tortilla Flat and shares them with...