The year in prizes
1940 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 3 notable books from our curated collection
John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer for The Grapes of Wrath. Carl Sandburg took the history prize for Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, and Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire won the Caldecott Medal for their picture book life of Lincoln.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Grapes of Wrath
Tom Joad comes home from prison on parole to find the Oklahoma tenant farm empty, the family evicted, and the land going under the tractor. The...
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Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
Carl Sandburg's four volume portrait of Lincoln's presidency carries the poet's earlier two volume Prairie Years forward through secession, the...
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Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters, Vols. VII and VIII
Ray Stannard Baker spent over a decade producing an eight volume documentary biography of Woodrow Wilson titled Life and Letters, drawing on the...
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Collected Poems
This volume gathers Mark Van Doren's poetry from 1922 to 1938, the first sixteen years of a writing life he carried on alongside four decades of...
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Daniel Boone
Daugherty traces Daniel Boone's life from a childhood in 1740s Pennsylvania through the years that made him famous, his explorations through the...
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Abraham Lincoln
This picture biography follows Abraham Lincoln from a boyhood spent in a one room log cabin on the frontier, splitting rails and reading borrowed...
What Shaped 1940
Two of the year's winners are about Lincoln, which is what a country does when it senses another test coming. France fell in June 1940 and Britain spent the autumn under bombardment while America argued about whether any of it was its business. Steinbeck's prize went to a novel that had spent a year being denounced as propaganda by growers and banned by school boards, a reminder that the books which later look inevitable are often the ones that were fought over first.
Published in 1940, 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 selectionFor Whom the Bell Tolls
American dynamiter Robert Jordan joins a small band of Republican guerrilla fighters in the mountains of Spain during the Spanish Civil War, tasked...
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Curated selectionNative Son
Bigger Thomas, a poor young Black man on Chicago's South Side, takes a chauffeur's job for the wealthy Dalton family and, on his first night...
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Curated selectionThe Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
John Singer, a deaf mute engraver, ekes out a quiet routine in a Georgia mill town until his only friend, a heavier and less capable deaf man named...