The year in prizes
1951 Book Award Winners
9 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Conrad Richter won the Pulitzer for The Town. The National Book Award went to The Collected Stories of William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg won the poetry Pulitzer for his Complete Poems, and Pär Lagerkvist took the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Town
Sayward Luckett walked into the Ohio wilderness as a girl in The Trees, cleared a farm and raised a family in The Fields, and in this final volume...
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The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
Forty two stories, assembled and arranged by Faulkner himself in 1950, and the arrangement is part of the work: six themed sections, The Country,...
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The Old Northwest, Pioneer Period 1815–1840
R. Carlyle Buley reconstructs daily life across the region that became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin during the decades when...
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John C. Calhoun: American Portrait
Margaret Coit spent nine years researching John C. Calhoun before she finished this biography, and the book follows a genuine political...
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Herman Melville
Newton Arvin's Herman Melville is a critical biography, which means the life and the books explain each other. Arvin traces the collapse of...
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Complete Poems
Complete Poems gathers more than three decades of Carl Sandburg's work into a single volume, running from his 1916 debut Chicago Poems through...
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Amos Fortune, Free Man
At Mun Shi is the son of an African chief, born around 1710, whose peaceful boyhood ends when slave traders raid his village and kill his father....
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The Egg Tree
On Easter morning at her grandmother's Pennsylvania farm, a girl named Katy searches the attic for hidden eggs along with her brother Carl and...
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Barabbas
Barabbas is the thief the crowd chooses to free instead of Jesus, and Lagerkvist's short novel follows him afterward, into a life he can neither...
What Shaped 1951
J. D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye in July 1951 and it won nothing, going on to sell more copies than everything on this list combined. The prizes instead honored established figures at the summing up stage of their careers, Faulkner and Sandburg both winning for collected work. In Washington the Senate hearings that would define McCarthyism were gathering force, and the blacklist had already reached publishing, though no prize list acknowledged it.
Published in 1951, 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 Catcher in the Rye
Holden Caulfield narrates the days after he is expelled from Pencey Preparatory Academy for failing four of five classes, leaving campus early...
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Curated selectionThe Day of the Triffids
Biologist Bill Masen wakes in a London hospital with his eyes bandaged after treatment for a sting from a triffid, one of the aggressive, stinging...