The year in prizes
1936 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
H. L. Davis won the Pulitzer for Honey in the Horn. Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel, the second American to take it, and Carol Ryrie Brink's Caddie Woodlawn won the Newbery Medal.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Honey in the Horn
Clay Calvert is a ranch hand in the employ of old Uncle Preston Shiveley when he is tricked into helping his stepbrother Wade break jail, and from...
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A Constitutional History of the United States
Andrew C. McLaughlin's A Constitutional History of the United States sets out to trace the development of American constitutional principles across...
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The Thought and Character of William James
Ralph Barton Perry had studied directly under William James at Harvard before building this two volume biography around the philosopher's own...
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Strange Holiness
Strange Holiness sets Robert P. Tristram Coffin's poems firmly on the ground of his own childhood, the saltwater farms, fishing villages and small...
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Caddie Woodlawn
Eleven year old Caddie Woodlawn runs half wild through the Wisconsin woods near her family's farm in the 1860s, a tomboy by her own family's choice...
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Long Day's Journey into Night
The entire play takes place across one day in August 1912 inside the Tyrone family's Connecticut summer house, and Eugene O'Neill spends that...
What Shaped 1936
O'Neill's Nobel recognized a writer who had almost single handedly given the United States a serious theater, dragging American drama away from melodrama and towards the long, punishing family plays that would culminate in Long Day's Journey into Night. Elsewhere 1936 was the year the Spanish Civil War began in July and drew writers from across Europe and America into it as soldiers and reporters. Margaret Mitchell published Gone with the Wind that summer and would take the Pulitzer with it the following spring.
Published in 1936, 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 selectionAbsalom, Absalom!
Thomas Sutpen arrives in Mississippi from nowhere in particular, seizes a hundred square miles of land from its Chickasaw owners, and builds a...
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Curated selectionNightwood
In 1920s Paris, Felix Volkbein, a man obsessed with a claim to noble ancestry he cannot fully prove, meets Robin Vote through the loquacious,...