The year in prizes
1955 Book Award Winners
11 prize categories represented, and 3 notable books from our curated collection
William Faulkner won the Pulitzer for A Fable. Wallace Stevens took the poetry prize for his Collected Poems, and Raymond Chandler won the Edgar Award for The Long Goodbye.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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A Fable
On a Monday in May 1918, a French regiment ordered over the top refuses to attack. The mutiny is the work of a corporal and his twelve followers,...
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A Fable
On a Monday in May 1918, a French regiment ordered over the top refuses to attack. The mutiny is the work of a corporal and his twelve followers,...
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Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History
Paul Horgan traces four centuries of life along the Rio Grande, using the river itself as the connecting thread through a history that otherwise...
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The Taft Story
William S. White had covered the United States Senate for the New York Times through most of Robert Taft's own time there, and he wrote this...
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The Measure of Man
In 1929 Joseph Wood Krutch published The Modern Temper, a famous and bleak argument that science had dissolved every ground for human dignity,...
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Collected Poems
Wallace Stevens spent his entire working life as an insurance executive, eventually a vice president at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity...
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They'd Rather Be Right
Two university professors build a computer called Bossy, which is designed to reason without the assumptions its makers carry. A mob destroys the...
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The Long Goodbye
Philip Marlowe befriends a drunk. Terry Lennox, white haired, scarred, courteous in ruin, keeps turning up in Marlowe's life until the night he...
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The Wheel on the School
In the small Dutch fishing village of Shora, a schoolgirl named Lina writes a class essay wondering why storks no longer nest on the village...
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Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper
Marcia Brown translates and illustrates Charles Perrault's version of the Cinderella story, keeping its familiar shape intact: a girl mistreated by...
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Independent People
Bjartur of Summerhouses spends eighteen years as another man's shepherd to earn the price of his own small croft in the Icelandic countryside, and...
What Shaped 1955
Chandler's last great novel about Philip Marlowe won the year's crime award, and it is the one where the detective story gets tired of itself and turns into something sadder, which is why it has outlasted the rest. Stevens won months before his death for the collected work of a man who had spent his career as an insurance executive in Hartford and written some of the strangest and best American poetry on the side. In December Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery.
Published in 1955, 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 selectionLolita
Humbert Humbert, a middle aged literature professor obsessed since adolescence with what he calls nymphets, rents a room from widow Charlotte Haze...
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Curated selectionThe Quiet American
Thomas Fowler, a middle aged British journalist who has covered the French war against communist insurgents in Vietnam for years without much...
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Curated selectionThe Talented Mr. Ripley
Tom Ripley, a broke young con man scraping by on petty mail fraud in New York, is hired by shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf to travel to Italy...