The year in prizes
1944 Book Award Winners
7 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Martin Flavin won the Pulitzer for Journey in the Dark. Esther Forbes won the Newbery Medal for Johnny Tremain, her novel of a boy apprentice caught up in revolutionary Boston, and Stephen Vincent Benét took the poetry prize after his death for Western Star.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Journey in the Dark
Sam Braden grows up poor on the wrong side of a small Mississippi river town, and spends the rest of his life getting away from it. He makes money,...
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The Growth of American Thought
Merle Curti's survey follows the development of American ideas from the colonial period into the early twentieth century, moving across religion,...
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The American Leonardo: The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse
Carleton Mabee's title points to the double career Morse packed into one lifetime, first as a serious painter, celebrated for large historical...
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Western Star
Western Star is Stephen Vincent Benét's attempt at a narrative poem on the American settling of the continent, tracing the movement of people...
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Johnny Tremain
Fourteen year old Johnny Tremain is the most talented apprentice in a Boston silversmith's shop in 1773, proud and quick tempered, until a jealous...
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Many Moons
Princess Lenore falls ill after eating too many raspberry tarts. Her father the King promises her anything she wants, and what she wants is the...
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The Long Journey
The Long Journey is a six novel cycle that Johannes V. Jensen wrote as nothing less than an evolutionary history of humanity itself, opening in...
What Shaped 1944
Allied troops landed in Normandy in June 1944 and Paris was liberated in August. Forbes had spent the previous years researching Paul Revere, and Johnny Tremain came out of the same work, arriving in the hands of American children in the middle of a war about very similar ideas. It has been in print ever since. Benét had died the year before at forty four, and his unfinished epic of American settlement was published and honored posthumously.
Published in 1944, 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 selectionFicciones
Ficciones gathers the short stories Borges wrote across the early 1940s, fourteen in its first edition and seventeen by 1956, most of them built as...
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Curated selectionThe Razor's Edge
Larry Darrell returns from the First World War changed by watching a friend die saving his life, and rather than settle into the comfortable...