The year in prizes
1962 Book Award Winners
11 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Theodore H. White won the Pulitzer for The Making of the President 1960, and Walker Percy took the National Book Award for The Moviegoer. Robert A. Heinlein won the Hugo for Stranger in a Strange Land, and John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
-
The Edge of Sadness
Father Hugh Kennedy narrates, and he is not a man in the middle of a crisis. He has already had it. He drank, for years, badly enough that the...
-
The Moviegoer
Binx Bolling is twenty nine, a stockbroker in the Gentilly suburb of New Orleans, good at his work, pleasant with everyone, quietly seeing his...
-
The Making of the President 1960
Theodore White followed John Kennedy and Richard Nixon through the entire 1960 campaign, from Kennedy's primary fights against Hubert Humphrey and...
-
The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766
Lawrence Henry Gipson, who taught colonial history at Lehigh University for more than four decades, wrote The Triumphant Empire as the tenth...
-
The City in History
The City in History is Lewis Mumford's attempt to tell the whole story of the city, from its origins in the burial grounds and shrines of the...
-
Poems
Poems is Alan Dugan's debut collection, chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and published when Dugan was already close to forty, after...
-
Stranger in a Strange Land
The first human expedition to Mars died, but a child was born there and raised by Martians. Twenty five years later a second mission brings...
-
Gideon's Fire
Commander George Gideon of Scotland Yard runs the CID the way a harbormaster runs a port: everything moves through him, nothing waits politely for...
-
The Bronze Bow
Daniel bar Jamin lost his parents to Rome years earlier, his father crucified as a rebel and his mother dead soon after from grief, and by the time...
-
Once a Mouse
Marcia Brown retells an Indian fable in the jataka tradition about a hermit who lives quietly in the forest with the power to change one animal...
-
The Grapes of Wrath
Tom Joad comes home from prison on parole to find the Oklahoma tenant farm empty, the family evicted, and the land going under the tractor. The...
What Shaped 1962
White invented modern campaign journalism with The Making of the President, following an election from the inside and writing it as narrative, and every campaign book since has been an argument with his. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in September 1962 and effectively began the environmental movement. In October the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the two nuclear powers closer to using their weapons than at any other point, which is worth remembering when reading anything published that autumn.
Published in 1962, 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 selectionA Clockwork Orange
Alex, a fifteen year old gang leader in an unnamed near future Britain, narrates his own campaign of robbery, assault and rape in Nadsat, a slang...
-
Curated selectionOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp on a fabricated espionage charge after being captured and later escaping German forces...