The year in prizes
1948 Book Award Winners
7 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
James A. Michener won the Pulitzer for Tales of the South Pacific. W. H. Auden took the poetry prize for The Age of Anxiety, and T. S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Tales of the South Pacific
Nineteen linked stories from the naval war against Japan, told by a staff officer who moves between islands carrying orders, gossip and the reader....
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Across the Wide Missouri
Bernard DeVoto's history recovers the brief, vivid decade of the Rocky Mountain fur trade in the 1830s, when American and European trappers,...
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Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow
Margaret Clapp built her Pulitzer winning biography out of her own doctoral dissertation, reviving a man whose real influence on nineteenth century...
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The Age of Anxiety
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue is a long poem in six parts set in a wartime bar in New York City, where four strangers, Quant, Malin,...
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The Twenty-One Balloons
Professor William Waterman Sherman, a retired arithmetic teacher who has decided he never wants to see another schoolchild, sets off from San...
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White Snow, Bright Snow
Snow begins falling on a small town, and the book follows how different people respond to it: the postman trudges his usual route more slowly, the...
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Four Quartets
Four Quartets is a sequence of four long poems, not a story, and each one is anchored to a real place and to one of the classical elements. Burnt...
What Shaped 1948
Auden gave the period its name. The Age of Anxiety described people who had survived a war and could not settle into the peace, and the phrase escaped the poem immediately and stuck to the whole decade. The year itself justified it: the Berlin Airlift began in June, Israel was founded in May, and the map of the world was being redrawn faster than anyone could follow. Michener's linked stories of the Pacific war would become the musical South Pacific the following year.
Published in 1948, 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 selectionI Capture the Castle
Seventeen year old Cassandra Mortmain writes her family's story into a series of journals from inside the crumbling, half furnished English castle...
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Curated selectionThe Naked and the Dead
An American platoon fights to secure the fictional Pacific island of Anopopei from Japanese forces under General Cummings, an officer who treats...