The year in prizes
1941 Book Award Winners
5 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
No Pulitzer for fiction was awarded in 1941. Marcus Lee Hansen won the history prize for The Atlantic Migration, Armstrong Sperry took the Newbery Medal for Call It Courage, and Robert Lawson won the Caldecott for They Were Strong and Good.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860
Marcus Lee Hansen's study follows the movement of Europeans across the Atlantic from the founding of Jamestown to the eve of the Civil War,...
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Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758: A Biography
Ola Elizabeth Winslow follows Jonathan Edwards from a Connecticut boyhood so precocious that he entered Yale just before his thirteenth birthday...
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Sunderland Capture
Leonard Bacon built a career on satiric poetry, publishing under the pen name Autolycus in the Saturday Review of Literature from 1923 onward, and...
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Call It Courage
Mafatu, whose name means Stout Heart though the island around him treats the name as a bitter joke, is a chief's son on the Pacific island of...
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They Were Strong and Good
Robert Lawson tells the story of his own family across several generations, tracing grandparents and parents who crossed the ocean, farmed, sailed...
What Shaped 1941
America spent most of 1941 arguing about whether to enter the war, then had the argument settled at Pearl Harbor in December. The fiction jury named no winner, and the books that did win look inward at how the country was made: a history of European migration across the Atlantic, a picture book about the author's own grandparents. Hansen's study of migration won as the United States was refusing entry to Jewish refugees from Europe, a contrast the prize did not address and history has not let go of.
Published in 1941, 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 selectionBetween the Acts
Over a single June day in 1939, the Oliver family and their neighbors gather at Pointz Hall, an English country house, to watch the village's...
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Curated selectionThe Last Tycoon
Cecilia Brady, the movie struck daughter of a Hollywood producer, narrates the rise of Monroe Stahr, a young studio executive modeled closely on...