Fond Books

The year in prizes

1938 Book Award Winners

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

Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American woman to do so. John P. Marquand took the Pulitzer for The Late George Apley, and the Caldecott Medal was awarded for the first time, to Dorothy P. Lathrop for Animals of the Bible.

Winners

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

What Shaped 1938

Buck's Nobel was controversial in American letters, where critics thought her popular success disqualified her, and the Academy's citation pointed instead at her portraits of Chinese peasant life and her biographies of her parents. The Caldecott Medal began that year, named for the Victorian illustrator Randolph Caldecott and created to do for picture books what the Newbery had done for children's writing: insist that the pictures were the work, not decoration around it. In Europe the Munich Agreement in September bought a year of peace that nobody believed in.

Published in 1938, 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
    Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

    A newspaperman named Fred Hale arrives in Brighton already marked for death, hunted through the crowds by a teenage gang leader named Pinkie Brown...

  • Curated selection
    Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

    An unnamed young woman working as a paid companion meets and, after a brief courtship in Monte Carlo, marries Maximilian de Winter, a wealthy...

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