The year in prizes
1950 Book Award Winners
9 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
The National Book Awards were founded in 1950, and Nelson Algren won the first fiction award for The Man with the Golden Arm. Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer for Annie Allen and became the first Black writer to receive a Pulitzer Prize in any category.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Way West
A wagon train forms at Independence, Missouri, in 1846, bound for Oregon, and the novel walks it every mile of the way: the Platte, the fords, the...
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The Man with the Golden Arm
Frankie Machine deals the cards in an illegal game on Division Street, in the Polish Chicago of the late 1940s, and his nickname is his trade: the...
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Art and Life in America
Oliver W. Larkin's survey traces American painting, sculpture, architecture, and design from the colonial period into the middle of the twentieth...
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John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy
Samuel Flagg Bemis, a Yale historian who would spend his career reshaping how Americans understood their own diplomatic history, wrote the first of...
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The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first winner of the first National Book Award for Nonfiction is a life of Ralph Waldo Emerson built from the ground up out of his letters....
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Annie Allen
Annie Allen follows a Black girl's life from birth through womanhood in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, told across three sections that trace...
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The Door in the Wall
Robin, the young son of a noble family in medieval England, is about to begin training as a knight when a sudden illness leaves his legs paralyzed,...
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Song of the Swallows
A boy named Juan lives near Mission San Juan Capistrano in Southern California and spends his days with Julian, an old gardener and bell ringer at...
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A History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell's history moves from the pre Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece to his own twentieth century, and he refuses at every stage...
What Shaped 1950
Brooks was thirty three, writing about the lives of Black women on the South Side of Chicago in intricate formal verse, and her prize was the first the Pulitzer had ever given a Black writer. The National Book Awards began the same year as a publisher led answer to the Pulitzers, and their first fiction winner, a novel about a card dealer and morphine addict in Chicago, showed immediately that they would go somewhere the Pulitzer would not. The Korean War began in June.
Published in 1950, 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, Robot
I, Robot gathers nine short stories Asimov had published individually in science fiction magazines during the 1940s, framed as a series of...
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Curated selectionThe Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury links a set of previously published magazine stories into one chronicle of Mars between 1999 and 2026, opening with three expeditions...