The year in prizes
1943 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Upton Sinclair won the Pulitzer for Dragon's Teeth, a novel following the rise of Nazism in Germany through the 1930s. Esther Forbes took the history prize for Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, and Robert Frost won his fourth poetry Pulitzer for A Witness Tree.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Dragon's Teeth
Lanny Budd is the grandson of an American arms manufacturer, the son of expatriate money, a picture dealer by trade and a socialist by conviction,...
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Paul Revere and the World He Lived In
Esther Forbes builds her biography of Paul Revere around a deliberate refusal to let the famous midnight ride of April 1775 swallow the rest of his...
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Admiral of the Ocean Sea
Samuel Eliot Morison did not write about Columbus from a library chair alone. In 1939 he led the Harvard Columbus Expedition, sailing much of the...
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A Witness Tree
A Witness Tree gathers forty two poems into five sections, One or Two, Two or More, Time Out, Quantula and Over Back, three of them opening with...
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Adam of the Road
Eleven year old Adam travels thirteenth century England with his father Roger, a minstrel, and Adam's beloved dog Nick, moving from fair to fair...
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The Little House
A small, sturdy house sits on a quiet hill in the countryside, watching the seasons turn and wondering, in the vague way Burton gives her, about...
What Shaped 1943
Sinclair's win is one of the few cases where a major American prize went to fiction about the Nazi rise while the war it caused was still being fought. The tide turned that year: Stalingrad ended in February, North Africa was cleared by May, and Allied troops landed in Sicily in July. Frost's fourth Pulitzer set a record for poetry that still stands, and A Witness Tree contains some of his darkest writing, which readers at the time were ready for.
Published in 1943, 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 Fountainhead
Howard Roark, an architect trained in the modernist tradition, is expelled from architecture school for refusing to design in the historical styles...
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Curated selectionThe Little Prince
A pilot, stranded in the Sahara after his plane engine fails, meets a small, solemn boy who asks him to draw a sheep and slowly reveals that he has...