The year in prizes
1964 Book Award Winners
11 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
John Updike won the National Book Award for The Centaur and Maurice Sendak won the Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are. Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and refused it.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Centaur
George Caldwell teaches general science at Olinger High School in Pennsylvania, and he is dying, or believes he is, or both; with Updike the...
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Anti-intellectualism in American Life
Richard Hofstadter set out to explain a contradiction he saw running through American history: a country that built more schools and colleges than...
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Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town
Sumner Chilton Powell built Puritan Village around a single question: how did a New England town actually come into being? Powell focuses on...
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John Keats
Walter Jackson Bate's biography follows John Keats from his 1795 birth above his grandfather's inn near Moorgate in London, through his father's...
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The Rise of the West
The Rise of the West is a history of the human community, in its own subtitle's words: an attempt to tell the story of civilization from the first...
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At the End of the Open Road
At the End of the Open Road takes its title, and its argument, from Walt Whitman's open road, the confident vision of American possibility...
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Way Station
Enoch Wallace fought at Gettysburg, came home to a farm in south western Wisconsin, and is still living in the same house a hundred years later,...
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The Light of Day
Arthur Abdel Simpson is one of the great disreputable narrators in the language: half English, half Egyptian, all grievance, a Cairo born hustler...
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It's Like This, Cat
Fourteen year old Dave Mitchell adopts a stray tomcat from his elderly neighbor Kate partly because he knows it will annoy his father, who has...
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Where the Wild Things Are
Max, wearing a wolf costume and behaving like one, chases the family dog with a fork and gets sent to bed without supper. Alone in his room, he...
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Nausea
Antoine Roquentin, a historian living alone in the fictional port town of Bouville, keeps a diary while researching the life of an obscure...
What Shaped 1964
Sartre declined the Nobel on the grounds that a writer must not allow himself to be turned into an institution, and the Academy awarded it anyway, so he remains a laureate who never accepted. Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are was attacked by librarians and psychologists for being too frightening for children, won the Caldecott regardless, and turned out to understand children better than its critics did. The Civil Rights Act was signed in July 1964.
Published in 1964, 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 selectionCharlie and the Chocolate Factory
Charlie Bucket, a good hearted boy from a desperately poor family, finds the fifth and final Golden Ticket hidden inside a Wonka chocolate bar and...
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Curated selectionLast Exit to Brooklyn
Last Exit to Brooklyn is built from six interconnected stories set among the bars, factories and housing projects of 1950s Brooklyn rather than one...