The year in prizes
1954 Book Award Winners
9 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Saul Bellow won the National Book Award for The Adventures of Augie March. Bruce Catton took the Pulitzer for A Stillness at Appomattox, the first Edgar Award went to Charlotte Jay for Beast in View, and Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Adventures of Augie March
Augie March announces himself in the first sentence, an American, Chicago born, going at things free style, and the novel keeps that promise for...
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A Stillness at Appomattox
A Stillness at Appomattox follows the Army of the Potomac through the last year of the Civil War, from the moment Grant comes east in the spring of...
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The Spirit of St. Louis
This is Charles Lindbergh's own account of his life, told from inside the cockpit of the flight that made him the most famous man in the world, and...
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A Stillness at Appomattox
A Stillness at Appomattox follows the Army of the Potomac through the last year of the Civil War, from the moment Grant comes east in the spring of...
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The Waking
The Waking: Poems 1933 to 1953 draws on twenty years of Theodore Roethke's writing, and its material returns again and again to the greenhouses his...
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Beat Not the Bones
Stella Warwick arrives in colonial Papua from Australia carrying one conviction the entire administration wishes she would take home again: that...
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...And Now Miguel
Twelve year old Miguel Chavez belongs to a family of sheep ranchers in New Mexico and wants nothing more than to be counted among the grown men who...
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Madeline's Rescue
Madeline, the smallest and boldest of twelve girls at a Paris boarding school run by Miss Clavel, falls into the Seine while walking along its bank...
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The Old Man and the Sea
Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty four days without a fish, long enough that the parents of Manolin, the boy who loves him,...
What Shaped 1954
The Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in May 1954, ruling school segregation unconstitutional and beginning the slow, contested work of the next twenty years. Bellow's Augie March opens by announcing itself as American and free to go at things as it has taught itself, which is as good a statement of the decade's ambition as any novel gave. The Mystery Writers of America began the Edgar Awards that year, and Charlotte Jay, an Australian writing about Papua, took the first one.
Published in 1954, 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 Fellowship of the Ring
Frodo Baggins inherits a plain gold ring from his cousin Bilbo along with Bag End itself, and lives with it for seventeen years before the wizard...
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Curated selectionUnder Milk Wood
Dylan Thomas's radio play follows one full day, dawn to dawn again, in the invented Welsh fishing village of Llareggub, opening with an unnamed...