The year in prizes
1945 Book Award Winners
7 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
John Hersey won the Pulitzer for A Bell for Adano, about an American officer governing an occupied Italian town. Karl Shapiro won the poetry prize for V-Letter and Other Poems, written while he was serving in the Pacific, and Gabriela Mistral became the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
-
A Bell for Adano
Major Victor Joppolo, an Italian American civil affairs officer from the Bronx, is put in charge of Adano, a small Sicilian town, in the summer of...
-
Unfinished Business
Stephen Bonsal's account draws directly on the diaries he kept while serving as a private interpreter and confidant to President Woodrow Wilson and...
-
George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel
Russel Blaine Nye calls his subject a Brahmin rebel because George Bancroft was born into exactly the kind of proper New England family, Phillips...
-
V-Letter and Other Poems
Karl Shapiro wrote most of V-Letter and Other Poems while serving as an Army company clerk in New Guinea during the Second World War, and the book...
-
Rabbit Hill
The wild animals living around an old, long neglected house in the Connecticut countryside, including Little Georgie the rabbit, his parents, Uncle...
-
Prayer for a Child
A young girl kneels for a bedtime prayer that blesses the ordinary parts of her day, her toy animals, her friends near and far, the birds outside...
-
Desolation
Desolation gathers poems written across roughly a decade of Gabriela Mistral's life as a rural Chilean schoolteacher, and its central, recurring...
What Shaped 1945
The war in Europe ended in May 1945 and the war in the Pacific ended in August after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hersey's novel about the decency and incompetence of an occupation was already the question of the coming decade, and Hersey himself would publish Hiroshima the following year and change what journalism was thought capable of. Mistral's Nobel, to a Chilean schoolteacher and poet, was the first the Academy had given to Latin America.
Published in 1945, 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.
-
Curated selectionAnimal Farm
The animals of Manor Farm, inspired by the elderly boar Old Major's dying vision of a world without human masters, rise up and drive out the...
-
Curated selectionCannery Row
Steinbeck sets the novel on the actual Cannery Row in Monterey, California, among the sardine canneries, and follows Doc, a marine biologist who...