The year in prizes
1969 Book Award Winners
14 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer for House Made of Dawn and became the first Native American writer to take the fiction prize. The first Booker Prize was awarded to P. H. Newby for Something to Answer For, Ursula K. Le Guin won the Nebula for The Left Hand of Darkness, and Samuel Beckett received the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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House Made of Dawn
Abel comes home to Walatowa in the summer of 1945 so drunk that he does not recognize his grandfather at the station. He has been at war in Europe,...
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Something to Answer For
Townrow is English, or possibly Irish, and is no longer certain which. He goes to Port Said in 1956 at the request of the widow of an old friend,...
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Steps
Steps has no plot, no names and no fixed country. It is a sequence of several dozen short episodes, some a paragraph, some a few pages, narrated by...
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So Human an Animal
René Dubos spent his working life as a microbiologist, the scientist who isolated tyrothricin and gramicidin from soil bacteria in 1939, among the...
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The Armies of the Night
Norman Mailer went to Washington in October 1967 to take part in the march on the Pentagon protesting the Vietnam War, and instead of simply...
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Origins of the Fifth Amendment: The Right Against Self-Incrimination
Leonard W. Levy traces the right against self incrimination from its earliest roots in medieval and early English courts, where the ecclesiastical...
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The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends
B. L. Reid's biography follows John Quinn from his 1870 birth in Tiffin, Ohio, the son of Irish immigrant parents, through the University of...
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White Over Black
White Over Black is a history of an idea: American attitudes toward Black people from the first English contacts with Africa in the 1550s to the...
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Of Being Numerous
Of Being Numerous takes its title from its long title poem, a sequence that asks what it means for a single person to exist as one of many, inside...
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Stand on Zanzibar
The world of 2010 holds seven billion people, and Brunner's title comes from the calculation that they would just about fit, shoulder to shoulder,...
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The Left Hand of Darkness
Genly Ai is an envoy from a federation of worlds, sent alone to the planet Gethen to invite it to join. Gethen is in an ice age, its politics are...
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A Case of Need
Karen Randall, seventeen, daughter of one of Boston medicine's dynastic families, bleeds to death after a botched abortion, and within hours the...
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The High King
Taran, once content to call himself only an Assistant Pig Keeper, returns home from his travels to learn that the Death Lord Arawn has seized...
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The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship
Arthur Ransome's retelling, first collected in his 1916 book Old Peter's Russian Tales, follows the youngest of three brothers, dismissed by his...
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Waiting for Godot
Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait beside a single bare tree on a country road for a man named Godot, who never comes, and Beckett gives them...
What Shaped 1969
Two things began in 1969 that shape this archive. The Booker Prize was founded in Britain and gave its first award to a novel about Suez, and Le Guin published The Left Hand of Darkness, a novel set among people with no fixed sex that changed what science fiction was understood to be capable of. Momaday's Pulitzer opened American fiction to Native writers in a way that is still being built on. Apollo 11 landed in July, Stonewall was in June, and Woodstock in August.
Published in 1969, 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 selectionSlaughterhouse-Five
Billy Pilgrim is an American optometrist who has come unstuck in time, a condition that lets him slip without warning among the days of his own...
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Curated selectionThe Godfather
Vito Corleone, head of a New York crime family, survives an assassination attempt ordered by the rival narcotics trafficker Virgil Sollozzo, who...