The year in prizes
1942 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Ellen Glasgow won the Pulitzer for In This Our Life. Margaret Leech took the history prize for Reveille in Washington, her account of the capital during the Civil War, and Robert McCloskey won the Caldecott Medal for Make Way for Ducklings.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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In This Our Life
Asa Timberlake's family has come down in the world: old Richmond stock, the tobacco company lost, the household dependent on the charity of his...
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Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865
Margaret Leech's history follows wartime Washington as a living, overcrowded city rather than a backdrop to battles fought elsewhere, tracking the...
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Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe
Forrest Wilson's biography follows Harriet Beecher Stowe from a childhood at the center of one of nineteenth century America's most consequential...
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The Dust Which Is God
William Rose Benét spent nearly three decades as the founding editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and The Dust Which Is God, the book...
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The Matchlock Gun
Ten year old Edward Van Alstyne lives with his mother Gertrude and younger sister Trudy on an isolated farm in New York's Hudson Valley in 1756,...
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Make Way for Ducklings
Mr. and Mrs. Mallard fly over Boston looking for a safe place to raise a family, rejecting one spot after another until they settle on a small...
What Shaped 1942
The first full year of American involvement in the war brought rationing, the draft and, in February, the order that sent more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans to internment camps. Prize lists carried on describing a country at peace with itself. Make Way for Ducklings, with its Boston policemen stopping traffic for a family of ducks, became one of the most loved American picture books ever made, and its gentleness is easier to understand knowing what the year around it looked like.
Published in 1942, 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 selectionThe Screwtape Letters
Screwtape, a senior and thoroughly bureaucratic devil, writes thirty one letters of advice to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter...
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Curated selectionThe Stranger
Meursault, a French Algerian clerk in Algiers, opens the novel with the flat announcement that his mother died today, or maybe yesterday, and...