The year in prizes
1967 Book Award Winners
13 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Bernard Malamud won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for The Fixer, based on a Jewish handyman falsely accused of murder in Tsarist Kiev. Anne Sexton took the poetry prize for Live or Die, and Miguel Ángel Asturias won the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
-
The Fixer
Yakov Bok is a fixer, a man who mends whatever is brought to him, and at the start of the book he has nothing left in his village: no work, no...
-
The Fixer
Yakov Bok is a fixer, a man who mends whatever is brought to him, and at the start of the book he has nothing left in his village: no work, no...
-
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
David Brion Davis set out to answer a question earlier historians had mostly treated as settled: how did centuries of Western civilization, steeped...
-
Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West
William H. Goetzmann follows the explorers, surveyors and government scientists who mapped the American West across the nineteenth century, arguing...
-
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain
Justin Kaplan's biography opens not with Samuel Clemens's 1835 birth in Florida, Missouri, but with the thirty one year old man home from four...
-
The Enlightenment, Vol. I: The Rise of Modern Paganism
The Rise of Modern Paganism is the first of Peter Gay's two volumes on the Enlightenment, and it reframed how a generation understood the...
-
Live or Die
Live or Die arranges its dated poems in the order Anne Sexton wrote them, so that reading the book means watching a genuine chronology of crisis...
-
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
The Moon in 2075 is a penal colony that has outlived its sentence. Three million people, descendants of convicts and political exiles, mine ice and...
-
The Einstein Intersection
Humanity is gone. Something else has arrived, taken up residence in the abandoned bodies and abandoned stories, and is trying to live inside them....
-
The King of the Rainy Country
The novel opens with its detective already shot: Inspector Piet Van der Valk of the Amsterdam police, shot and half conscious, drifting through...
-
Up a Road Slowly
After her mother's death, seven year old Julie Trelling is sent to live in the countryside with her unmarried aunt Cordelia, a schoolteacher Julie...
-
Sam, Bangs & Moonshine
Samantha, known to everyone as Sam, is a fisherman's daughter who fills the gap left by her dead mother with elaborate stories she calls moonshine,...
-
Men of Maize
Men of Maize opens among an indigenous community in Guatemala that grows maize as a sacred food rather than a crop to sell, led by Gaspar Ilom, who...
What Shaped 1967
Sexton wrote about depression, the body and the wish to die with a directness American poetry had not permitted a woman before, and the Pulitzer for Live or Die confirmed that confessional poetry had won its argument. Malamud's novel about a man destroyed by a lie the state finds useful was read in 1967 as being about more than Tsarist Russia. That summer brought uprisings in Newark and Detroit, and the war in Vietnam was consuming the country's politics.
Published in 1967, 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 selectionThe Master and Margarita
The devil, calling himself Professor Woland, arrives in 1930s Moscow with a retinue that includes a talking black cat named Behemoth, and sets...
-
Curated selectionThe Outsiders
Ponyboy Curtis, a fourteen year old greaser growing up in working class Tulsa, lives with his older brothers Darry and Sodapop after their parents'...