The year in prizes
1958 Book Award Winners
11 prize categories represented, and 3 notable books from our curated collection
James Agee won the Pulitzer for A Death in the Family, published after his death, and John Cheever took the National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle. Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in Literature and was forced to refuse it.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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A Death in the Family
Jay Follet takes a phone call in the middle of the night. His father may be dying, out in the Tennessee country, so he drives out, finds the old...
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The Wapshot Chronicle
St Botolphs is an old Massachusetts river town subsiding gracefully into the past, and the Wapshots are its first family in the same condition....
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Banks and Politics in America
Bray Hammond's Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War traces the long American argument over banking as a fight over...
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George Washington, Vols. I-VII
Douglas Southall Freeman's seven volume George Washington follows its subject from his birth in 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, through an...
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The Lion and the Throne
The Lion and the Throne is the life and times of Sir Edward Coke, the Elizabethan and Jacobean jurist who did more than any other single person to...
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Promises: Poems 1954–1956
Robert Penn Warren wrote most of Promises during a genuinely new period of his life: he had married the writer Eleanor Clark in 1952, and the...
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The Big Time
Two factions, the Spiders and the Snakes, are fighting a war up and down the whole of history, each changing the past to weaken the other, so that...
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Room to Swing
Toussaint Marcus Moore is a private detective in 1950s New York, working small insurance jobs out of a cold water office, and the case that changes...
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Rifles for Watie
Sixteen year old Jefferson Davis Bussey enlists in the Union Army in 1861 after bushwhackers raid his family's Kansas farm, joining the fighting...
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Time of Wonder
A family spends a summer on an island in Maine's Penobscot Bay, the days marked out by ordinary pleasures, rowing among the ledges, watching gulls...
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Doctor 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...
What Shaped 1958
Pasternak's Nobel is the most political the Academy has ever awarded. Doctor Zhivago had been rejected in the Soviet Union and smuggled out to be published in Italy, and when the prize was announced the Soviet state gave him a choice between the award and his country. He declined it by telegram. Agee had died three years earlier leaving an unfinished manuscript about his father's death, which was assembled by an editor and won anyway, one of the tenderest books ever to take the prize.
Published in 1958, 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 selectionBreakfast at Tiffany's
An unnamed narrator, a young writer new to New York in 1943, becomes friends with Holly Golightly, the free spirited young woman living one floor...
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Curated selectionThe Once and Future King
T. H. White combines four linked books, most published individually two decades earlier and revised here, into one continuous account of King...
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Curated selectionThings Fall Apart
Okonkwo, a respected farmer and wrestling champion in the Igbo village of Umuofia, has built his standing entirely by being everything his own...