The year in prizes
1970 Book Award Winners
14 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Bernice Rubens won the Booker for The Elected Member and Joyce Carol Oates took the National Book Award for them. Ursula K. Le Guin won the Hugo for The Left Hand of Darkness, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
Thirty stories, written between 1944 and 1968, arranged by where they take place: Americans loose in Europe, Boston and New England, the Colorado...
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The Elected Member
Norman Zweck was a prodigy. He was a barrister at twenty five, the pride of a Jewish family in the East End of London, and he is now forty one,...
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them
Loretta Botsford is sixteen on the first page, in a midwestern canal city in the 1930s, pretty and dreamy and certain something is about to begin,...
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Gandhi's Truth
Erik Erikson, the psychoanalyst who coined the term identity crisis, turns his clinical training toward Mahatma Gandhi in Gandhi's Truth, building...
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Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department
Dean Acheson's memoir covers the years he spent at the center of American foreign policy as the Cold War took its early shape, first as under...
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Huey Long
T. Harry Williams's biography follows Huey Long from his 1893 birth near Winnfield in the poor, populist minded hill country of north central...
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Huey Long
Huey Long ran Louisiana as no American state has been run before or since, a governor and then senator who built roads, schools, and hospitals for...
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Untitled Subjects
Untitled Subjects gathers dramatic monologues and imagined letters spoken in the voices of nineteenth century figures, mostly artists and writers,...
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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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Ringworld
Louis Wu is two hundred years old, bored, and celebrating his birthday by teleporting round the Earth to stay ahead of midnight, when he is...
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Forfeit
James Tyrone writes for the Sunday Blaze, racing journalism's respectable end, and the novel opens with a colleague going out a window: Bert...
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Sounder
An unnamed Black sharecropping family in the rural South survives on almost nothing until the father, driven by his children's hunger, steals a ham...
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Sylvester and the Magic Pebble
Sylvester Duncan, a young donkey who collects unusual pebbles, finds a shining red one on Strawberry Hill and discovers, in a moment of pure luck,...
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp on a fabricated espionage charge after being captured and later escaping German forces...
What Shaped 1970
Solzhenitsyn had spent eight years in the labor camps he wrote about, and his Nobel could not be collected: like Pasternak twelve years earlier he was warned he would not be allowed back into the Soviet Union, so he stayed away from Stockholm. Oates won for a novel about violence and poverty in Detroit that ends with the 1967 riot. National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State in May, and the first Earth Day was held in April.
Published in 1970, 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 selectionDeliverance
Four suburban Atlanta men, the narrator Ed Gentry, the survivalist Lewis Medlock, the insurance salesman Bobby Trippe, and the guitar playing...
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Curated selectionThe Bluest Eye
Nine year old Claudia MacTeer narrates from 1941 Lorain, Ohio, where her family has taken in Pecola Breedlove, a classmate whose own home has just...