The year in prizes
1956 Book Award Winners
11 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
MacKinlay Kantor won the Pulitzer for Andersonville, his novel of the Confederate prison camp. Robert A. Heinlein took the Hugo for Double Star, Elizabeth Bishop won the poetry prize, and Juan Ramón Jiménez received the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Andersonville
Andersonville was the Confederate prison pen in Georgia where, in the last fourteen months of the Civil War, some thirteen thousand Union prisoners...
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Ten North Frederick
The novel opens at Joe Chapin's funeral in 1945, with Gibbsville, Pennsylvania performing its grief and privately totting up what it actually knew...
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The Age of Reform
Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. traces a single line of American reform politics from the Populist revolt of the 1890s...
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Benjamin Henry Latrobe
Talbot Faulkner Hamlin's biography follows Benjamin Henry Latrobe from his birth in 1764 at the Moravian settlement of Fulneck, near Leeds, through...
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An American in Italy
American in Italy is a travel book with a memoirist's heart, the record of the eighteen months Herbert Kubly spent in Italy on a Fulbright grant in...
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Poems: North & South - A Cold Spring
This volume combines Elizabeth Bishop's 1946 debut collection, North and South, with eighteen new poems gathered under the heading A Cold Spring,...
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Double Star
Lorenzo Smythe is a magnificent actor in his own estimation and an unemployed one in everyone else's: vain, broke, prejudiced, and drinking in a...
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Beast in View
Helen Clarvoe is thirty years old, has a small fortune, and lives alone in a residential hotel because she prefers it to people. Her mother resents...
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Carry On, Mr. Bowditch
Nathaniel Bowditch grows up in Salem, Massachusetts, in the years after the Revolutionary War, the smallest and physically weakest of a large...
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Frog Went A-Courtin'
John Langstaff gathered and retold the old folk ballad about a frog who dresses up, mounts his horse, and rides off to court Miss Mouse, a...
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Platero and I
Platero and I has almost no plot in the ordinary sense; it is a sequence of short prose poems addressed directly to Platero, a small silver donkey...
What Shaped 1956
Andersonville is a very long book about men starving in a stockade, and it was a bestseller, which says something about how ready Americans were in 1956 to look at their own history without softening. Bishop's win began a career that has grown steadily larger since her death, and she is now read more than most of the poets who were famous while she was alive. Abroad it was the year of Suez and of the Hungarian uprising crushed by Soviet tanks in November.
Published in 1956, 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 selectionGiovanni's Room
David, a young American living in Paris while his girlfriend Hella travels in Spain to decide whether to marry him, meets an Italian bartender...
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Curated selectionHowl and Other Poems
Allen Ginsberg's title poem opens with its most quoted line, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, and spends its long first...