The year in prizes
1966 Book Award Winners
13 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Katherine Anne Porter took both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for her Collected Stories. Frank Herbert's Dune won the Hugo, Daniel Keyes won a Nebula for Flowers for Algernon, and the Nobel was shared between Nelly Sachs and Shmuel Agnon.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
Porter published very little and discarded most of what she wrote, and this is the whole of it: twenty six stories, gathered from three earlier...
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The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
Porter published very little and discarded most of what she wrote, and this is the whole of it: twenty six stories, gathered from three earlier...
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Wandering Through Winter
Edwin Way Teale closes out the American seasons quartet he had been writing for more than a decade with a winter journey of some twenty thousand...
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The Life of the Mind in America
Perry Miller spent most of his Harvard career reconstructing the intellectual world of colonial Puritan New England, and The Life of the Mind in...
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A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days follows John F. Kennedy's presidency from the 1960 campaign through the funeral that closed it, written by a...
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A Thousand Days
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was a Pulitzer winning Harvard historian when John F. Kennedy brought him into the White House as special assistant, and...
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Selected Poems
Selected Poems 1930 to 1965 draws together thirty five years of Richard Eberhart's work, from poems written not long after his mother's death from...
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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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This Immortal
Conrad Nomikos is Commissioner of Arts, Monuments and Archives on an Earth that most of the human race has abandoned. A nuclear war left large...
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Babel-17
An interstellar war is going badly. Alliance installations keep being sabotaged, and the only trace is an unidentified transmission that the...
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Flowers for Algernon
Charlie Gordon is thirty two, has an IQ of sixty eight, works at a bakery sweeping floors, and attends a night class for adults with learning...
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The Quiller Memorandum
Quiller works alone. No cover organization will claim him, no gun, he despises them as noise, no name beyond the workname: he is a shadow executive...
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I, Juan de Pareja
Juan de Pareja is born enslaved in Seville around 1610 and orphaned as a small child, passing first to a kind mistress and then, after her death,...
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Always Room for One More
Sorche Nic Leodhas retells a Scottish folk song she said she first heard from her own grandfather, about Lachlan MacLachlan, called Lachie, a...
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O the Chimneys
This is a selection in English of Nelly Sachs's poems, together with her verse play Eli, and it is the usual door into her work for readers who do...
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Only Yesterday
Isaac Kumer leaves Galicia for Ottoman Palestine with the full conviction of the Zionist pioneers around him, expecting to work the land, but he...
What Shaped 1966
Porter was seventy six and had published fewer than thirty stories in forty years, which is a reminder that the prizes occasionally reward a slow perfectionist over a productive career. The Nobel that year went jointly to a German Jewish poet who had escaped to Sweden days before deportation and to a Hebrew novelist in Jerusalem, a pairing the Academy made deliberately. American troop numbers in Vietnam passed four hundred thousand, and the Cultural Revolution began in China.
Published in 1966, 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 selectionIn Cold Blood
On a November night in 1959, two ex convicts, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, break into the Kansas farmhouse of Herbert Clutter, a respected...
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Curated selectionThe Crying of Lot 49
Oedipa Maas, a suburban California housewife, is named co executor of the sprawling estate of her former lover Pierce Inverarity, a real estate...