The year in prizes
1965 Book Award Winners
13 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Frank Herbert won the first Nebula Award for Dune and Saul Bellow took the National Book Award for Herzog. John le Carré won the Edgar for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Mikhail Sholokhov received the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Keepers of the House
Abigail Howland Tolliver sits in the house her family built and tells the story, and by the end she is not a sympathetic narrator, which is the...
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Herzog
Moses Herzog, forty seven, scholar of Romanticism, twice divorced, is coming apart in the most articulate way imaginable: he writes letters....
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O Strange New World
Howard Mumford Jones spent decades studying how American culture took shape, and O Strange New World, subtitled American Culture: The Formative...
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The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879
Irwin Unger's first major book examines the fight over American money in the years right after the Civil War, when the country had to decide what...
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Henry Adams
Ernest Samuels's three volume biography follows Henry Adams from his 1838 birth in Boston, into a family that had already produced two presidents,...
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The Life of Lenin
Louis Fischer spent fourteen years reporting from Moscow, believed in the Soviet experiment, and broke with it in the famous essay he contributed...
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77 Dream Songs
77 Dream Songs collects the first phase of what became John Berryman's signature project, a long sequence built around Henry, a battered, self...
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The Wanderer
A planet the size of Earth's moon, striped purple and yellow like a child's marble, appears in the sky without warning. It has come out of...
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Dune
The desert planet Arrakis produces the spice melange, which extends life, sharpens the mind, and without which the Guild navigators cannot fold...
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The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Alec Leamas runs the Berlin station's networks until Mundt, East Germany's counterintelligence head, rolls them up one agent at a time, the last...
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Shadow of a Bull
Manolo Olivar has grown up in the small Spanish town of Arcangel entirely inside his dead father's shadow, since Juan Olivar was a legendary...
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May I Bring a Friend?
A well mannered young boy is invited, again and again, to visit the king and queen for tea, and each time he asks whether he might bring a friend...
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And Quiet Flows the Don
Grigory Melekhov is a young Don Cossack whose family carries a tellingly foreign nickname, the Turks, from an ancestor who married a captive bride...
What Shaped 1965
The Science Fiction Writers of America created the Nebula Award in 1965 to be voted by writers rather than fans, and gave the first one to Dune, which has since become the bestselling science fiction novel ever published. Le Carré's spy novel refused every glamour the genre had been built on and was read as a verdict on the Cold War itself. In America 1965 brought Selma, the Voting Rights Act in August, the assassination of Malcolm X in February, and the first large deployments to Vietnam.
Published in 1965, 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 selectionStoner
William Stoner arrives at the University of Missouri from his family's poor farm intending to study agriculture and instead falls, almost by...
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Curated selectionThe Magus
Nicholas Urfe, a restless young Oxford graduate, takes a teaching post on the small Greek island of Phraxos mainly to escape a relationship in...