The year in prizes
1949 Book Award Winners
7 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
James Gould Cozzens won the Pulitzer for Guard of Honor, set on an American air base during the war. William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Marguerite Henry took the Newbery Medal for King of the Wind.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Guard of Honor
Three days, the 2nd to the 4th of September 1943, at Ocanara, an Army Air Forces base in central Florida, where a project organization studies how...
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The Disruption of American Democracy
Roy Franklin Nichols examines how the Democratic Party, the one national political organization still holding together voters from both North and...
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Roosevelt and Hopkins
Robert Sherwood came to this book as an insider rather than a historian working from a distance, a three time Pulitzer winning playwright who had...
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Terror and Decorum
Peter Viereck published Terror and Decorum in 1948, the collection that won him the Pulitzer the following year, at a point in his career when he...
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King of the Wind
Agba, a mute stable boy in the Sultan of Morocco's stables, cares for a foal born with contradictory markings, a lucky white heel and an unlucky...
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The Big Snow
As autumn ends, the animals around a patch of woodland prepare for winter each in their own way: geese gather and fly south, a groundhog and other...
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The Sound and the Fury
Faulkner tells the collapse of the once prominent Compson family of Mississippi through four different narrators, each covering roughly the same...
What Shaped 1949
Faulkner's Nobel came when much of his work was out of print in America, and his acceptance speech in Stockholm, insisting that writers must write about the human heart in conflict with itself rather than about fear of the bomb, is among the most quoted things ever said about literature. The fear was reasonable: the Soviet Union tested an atomic weapon in August 1949, NATO was founded in April, and the Chinese revolution succeeded in October.
Published in 1949, 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 selectionNineteen Eighty-Four
Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth in a totalitarian London, altering old newspaper articles to match whatever the ruling Party currently...
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Curated selectionThe Sheltering Sky
Port Moresby and his wife Kit, a restless, unhappy American couple, travel deep into the Sahara after the Second World War with their friend...