The year in prizes
1946 Book Award Winners
5 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
For the second time the Pulitzer jury named no novel at all. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. won the Pulitzer for The Age of Jackson, Hermann Hesse took the Nobel, and Lois Lenski's Strawberry Girl won the Newbery Medal.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Age of Jackson
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. reinterprets Jacksonian democracy as a struggle over economic power rather than a story about the frontier remaking...
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Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir
Linnie Marsh Wolfe came to John Muir's life as a devoted specialist rather than a professional biographer, a Los Angeles librarian who spent years...
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Strawberry Girl
Birdie Boyer's family moves from North Carolina to the backwoods of central Florida to grow strawberries, settling next to the Slater family, whose...
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The Rooster Crows
This collection gathers American nursery rhymes, counting out chants, skipping rope rhymes and finger games that children once passed around on...
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Steppenwolf
Harry Haller is a middle aged intellectual so estranged from ordinary life that he thinks of himself as two creatures sharing one body, a civilized...
What Shaped 1946
The first full year of peace was spent working out what the war had meant. The Nuremberg trials ran through the autumn, the United Nations held its first session, and Churchill described an iron curtain falling across Europe. Schlesinger's Age of Jackson recast American democracy as a story of class conflict rather than frontier expansion and set the terms for a generation of historians. Hesse's Nobel honored a writer who had opposed German nationalism through both wars from exile in Switzerland.
Published in 1946, 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 Street
Lutie Johnson, a single Black mother recently separated from her unfaithful husband, moves with her young son Bub into a cramped apartment on a...
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Curated selectionTitus Groan
In the vast, crumbling castle of Gormenghast, ruled by the seventy sixth Earl Sepulchrave through rituals so old that no one, including the Earl...