The year in prizes
1959 Book Award Winners
11 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Bernard Malamud won the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel. Robert Lewis Taylor took the Pulitzer for The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, and Elizabeth George Speare won the Newbery Medal for The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
Jaimie McPheeters is thirteen when his father decides that Louisville has nothing more to offer, that the gold in California is real, and that the...
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The Magic Barrel
Thirteen stories, mostly set among poor Jewish shopkeepers, students and luftmenschen in New York, written in a voice that mixes plain American...
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The Republican Era: 1869–1901
The Republican Era: 1869 to 1901 is the fourth and concluding volume of Leonard D. White's history of American public administration, a project he...
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Woodrow Wilson, American Prophet
Arthur Walworth's biography, the first of two volumes on Woodrow Wilson, follows him from his birth in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856, the son of a...
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Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël
Germaine de Staël was the daughter of Necker, the finance minister whose dismissal helped trigger the French Revolution, and she spent her life at...
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Selected Poems 1928–1958
Selected Poems 1928 to 1958 gathers three decades of Stanley Kunitz's work, beginning with his 1930 debut Intellectual Things and continuing...
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A Case of Conscience
Father Ramon Ruiz Sanchez is a Jesuit and a biologist, one of four scientists sent to assess whether the planet Lithia should be opened to...
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The Eighth Circle
Murray Kirk runs the best private inquiry agency in Manhattan, and Ellin's first move is to dismantle every expectation the phrase private...
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The Witch of Blackbird Pond
Sixteen year old Kit Tyler leaves her sunny, comfortable life in Barbados after her grandfather's death and sails to Wethersfield, Connecticut, in...
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Chanticleer and the Fox
Barbara Cooney adapts Geoffrey Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, one story from The Canterbury Tales, into a picture book built around Chauntecleer, a...
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And Suddenly It's Evening
This is a poetry collection built around one of the shortest and most famous poems in modern Italian, its three line title poem stating the whole...
What Shaped 1959
Malamud's stories of Jewish immigrants and shopkeepers in New York brought a voice into the center of American fiction that had mostly been treated as a regional speciality, and the National Book Award for a story collection was itself unusual enough to be noticed. Castro took Havana in January 1959, Alaska and Hawaii became states, and the country ended the decade in a prosperity it had stopped expecting to lose.
Published in 1959, 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 selectionA Separate Peace
Gene Forrester returns to his old prep school, Devon, fifteen years after graduating, drawn back to two places on campus he has never been able to...
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Curated selectionNaked Lunch
William Lee, an addict narrator standing in for Burroughs himself, flees a United States he describes only in glimpses and surfaces in Interzone, a...