The year in prizes
1963 Book Award Winners
12 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
The Pulitzer went to William Faulkner for The Reivers, awarded months after his death, and Barbara W. Tuchman took the non fiction prize for The Guns of August. Philip K. Dick won the Hugo for The Man in the High Castle, Madeleine L'Engle won the Newbery for A Wrinkle in Time, and Ezra Jack Keats took the Caldecott for The Snowy Day.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Reivers
In 1905 Lucius Priest is eleven, the family is away at a funeral, and Boon Hogganbeck wants the car. It is Lucius's grandfather's Winton Flyer, one...
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Morte d'Urban
Father Urban Roche is the star of the Clementines, an obscure and struggling Catholic order he single handedly keeps visible: a magnificent...
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The Guns of August
Barbara Tuchman opens The Guns of August at the funeral of Britain's King Edward VII in May 1910, a gathering of European royalty so grand it reads...
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Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878
Constance McLaughlin Green, an urban historian who had directed the Washington History Project at American University under a six year Rockefeller...
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Henry James
Leon Edel's biography, ultimately five volumes long, follows Henry James across the decades from his 1843 birth at Washington Place in Manhattan,...
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Henry James, Vol. II: The Conquest of London and Vol. III: The Middle Years
These are the second and third volumes of Leon Edel's five volume life of Henry James, the biography that occupied Edel for more than twenty years...
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Pictures from Brueghel
Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems is William Carlos Williams's final collection, gathering late poems that include a sequence responding...
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The Man in the High Castle
The Axis won. Germany and Japan divided the United States in 1947, the Reich holds the east and has drained the Mediterranean for farmland and...
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Death and the Joyful Woman
The Joyful Woman is a pub, or was: a beautiful old timbered inn whose name and painted sign outlived its trade, bought and vulgarized by Alfred...
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A Wrinkle in Time
Meg Murry, awkward and quick tempered, has spent months worrying about her scientist father, who vanished while researching a way to fold the...
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The Snowy Day
Peter wakes to find his whole neighborhood covered in the first snow of the season and spends the day outside on his own in a bright red snowsuit,...
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Mythistorema
Mythistorema gathers twenty four short poems, one for each book of Homer's Odyssey, and sets that ancient story of wandering down inside modern...
What Shaped 1963
The Snowy Day is the quiet landmark here: a picture book with a small Black boy as its hero, which was close to unheard of in American children's publishing, and which won the Caldecott and stayed in print forever. Tuchman's account of how Europe stumbled into war in 1914 was read closely in the Kennedy White House during the missile crisis. A quarter of a million people marched on Washington in August, and Kennedy was killed in Dallas in November.
Published in 1963, 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 selectionCat's Cradle
A writer researching a book about the day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima instead finds himself drawn into the lives of the three grown children...
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Curated selectionThe Bell Jar
Esther Greenwood, a talented college student who wins a coveted summer internship at a New York fashion magazine, arrives expecting the experience...