The year in prizes
1957 Book Award Winners
9 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
John F. Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Profiles in Courage. Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature at forty three, and Richard Wilbur took the poetry prize for Things of This World.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
-
The Field of Vision
A handful of Nebraskans sit in the stands at a Mexican bullfight, and that is the entire present action of the novel: the bulls die in the sand...
-
Russia Leaves the War: Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920
George F. Kennan opens his history of early Soviet American relations with Russia's exit from the First World War, following the confused, often...
-
Profiles in Courage
Profiles in Courage gathers eight sketches of United States senators who broke with their own party or their constituents to act on a principle,...
-
Russia Leaves the War
Russia Leaves the War covers four months that set the pattern for the twentieth century: November 1917 to March 1918, from the Bolshevik seizure of...
-
Things of This World
Things of This World, Richard Wilbur's 1956 collection, marked his breakthrough after a decade spent building a reputation, since his 1947 debut...
-
A Dram of Poison
Kenneth Gibson is a gentle poetry professor in his fifties who marries Rosemary James, a doctor's exhausted daughter, in a spirit of pure rescue: a...
-
Miracles on Maple Hill
Marly's family moves from the city to a run down farmhouse on Maple Hill in rural Pennsylvania so that her father, a World War II veteran left...
-
A Tree Is Nice
In plain, short sentences, Janice May Udry lists the reasons a tree is nice: it gives shade in summer, drops leaves to jump in come fall, grows...
-
The Stranger
Meursault, a French Algerian clerk in Algiers, opens the novel with the flat announcement that his mother died today, or maybe yesterday, and...
What Shaped 1957
Kennedy was a senator with a reputation to build, and the prize for Profiles in Courage helped build it, though the extent of Theodore Sorensen's involvement in the writing has been argued over ever since. Camus was the second youngest Nobel laureate in literature and would die in a car crash three years later. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, and in September federal troops escorted nine Black students into a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Published in 1957, 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.
-
Curated selectionDoctor Zhivago
Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet orphaned young in prerevolutionary Russia, marries Tonya, the daughter of the family that raised him, but his life...
-
Curated selectionOn the Road
Sal Paradise, a young writer in New York recovering from a divorce and a long illness, falls in with Dean Moriarty, a manic, charismatic ex convict...