The year in prizes
1937 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 3 notable books from our curated collection
Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer for Gone with the Wind, which had sold a million copies within six months. Robert Frost took his third poetry prize for A Further Range, and Roger Martin du Gard won the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Gone with the Wind
Scarlett O'Hara is sixteen when the Civil War starts, the spoiled daughter of a north Georgia plantation, in love with Ashley Wilkes, who marries...
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The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865
Van Wyck Brooks opens The Flowering of New England in 1815 and closes it in 1865, tracing the fifty years in which a relatively small, provincial...
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Hamilton Fish
Allan Nevins built his biography of Hamilton Fish around a paradox: an administration remembered mostly for corruption produced, in its secretary...
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A Further Range
A Further Range, published in 1936, extends Robert Frost's familiar pastoral idiom into more openly argumentative territory than his earlier...
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Roller Skates
Ten year old Lucinda Wyman spends a year of unusual freedom in 1890s New York City while her parents travel in Italy, left in the care of two...
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The Thibaults
Antoine and Jacques Thibault grow up under their domineering, devoutly Catholic father Oscar in Paris, and Roger Martin du Gard splits the family...
What Shaped 1937
No American novel of the century sold like Gone with the Wind, and few have been argued about as long. Mitchell's Georgia is seen from inside the plantation household, and the version of slavery and Reconstruction it offered shaped the popular understanding of the period for generations, which is exactly why the book is now read as much for what it reveals about 1937 as about the 1860s. The film would follow two years later and fix that version still further.
Published in 1937, 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 selectionOf Mice and Men
George Milton and Lennie Small, two itinerant ranch workers during the Depression, move from job to job across California sharing a single dream: a...
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Curated selectionThe Hobbit
Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit who prizes his quiet home and his regular meals above any adventure, is talked into joining thirteen dwarves led by Thorin...
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Curated selectionTheir Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford, back in the all Black Florida town of Eatonville after years away, tells her friend Phoeby the story of her life and her three...