The year in prizes
1961 Book Award Winners
11 prize categories represented, and 3 notable books from our curated collection
Harper Lee won the Pulitzer for To Kill a Mockingbird. Walter M. Miller, Jr. took the Hugo for A Canticle for Leibowitz, and William L. Shirer won the National Book Award for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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To Kill a Mockingbird
Maycomb, Alabama, in the middle of the Depression. Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, is six when the book opens and narrates it years later as an...
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The Waters of Kronos
John Donner is an old, successful, unwell writer who has driven east from California to stand at the edge of a reservoir. Under it is Unionville,...
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Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference
Herbert Feis, who had served as the State Department's ranking economic adviser through the Hoover and Roosevelt years before turning to history,...
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Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War
David Donald's biography follows Charles Sumner from his 1811 birth on Boston's Beacon Hill, in a neighborhood that was then home to much of the...
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
William L. Shirer watched the Third Reich happen. As a correspondent in Berlin from 1934 to 1940, broadcasting for CBS, he stood in the Nuremberg...
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Times Three: Selected Verse From Three Decades
Times Three collects seventy new poems Phyllis McGinley added to a selection chosen from three earlier decades of light verse, all of it built...
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A Canticle for Leibowitz
After the nuclear war came the Simplification, in which survivors hunted down and killed the scientists and engineers they blamed, and burned every...
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The Progress of a Crime
On Guy Fawkes Night in an English provincial town, by the light of the village green bonfire, a local man is stabbed to death in front of the...
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Island of the Blue Dolphins
Karana is a young girl of the Nicoleño people, living on an island off the California coast, when a ship arrives to evacuate her tribe to the...
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Baboushka and the Three Kings
Ruth Robbins retells a Russian folk legend about Baboushka, an old woman so absorbed in keeping her small house in order that when three richly...
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The Bridge on the Drina
The novel takes a single stone bridge over the Drina River in Bosnia as its real protagonist, following the small town of Višegrad that grew up...
What Shaped 1961
To Kill a Mockingbird has probably been assigned to more American schoolchildren than any other novel, and the prize arrived a year after publication with the civil rights movement building around it. Miller's Canticle, a novel about monks preserving scientific knowledge through the centuries after a nuclear war, was the first science fiction novel many critics took seriously. The Berlin Wall went up in August 1961, and Freedom Riders were beaten in Alabama that spring.
Published in 1961, 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 selectionCatch-22
Captain John Yossarian, a B-25 bombardier stationed on the island of Pianosa off the Italian coast during the Second World War, spends the novel...
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Curated selectionFranny and Zooey
The book collects two connected stories about the Glass family that Salinger had already published separately in The New Yorker. In Franny, the...
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Curated selectionRevolutionary Road
Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple settled into a Connecticut suburb in 1955, privately believe they are better than the conformity around...