The year in prizes
1974 Book Award Winners
13 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
No Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded in 1974. The jury had unanimously chosen Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and the Pulitzer board overruled them, calling it unreadable and obscene, so the prize went to nobody. Pynchon shared the National Book Award instead, and the Booker was split between Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Holiday
Edwin Fisher, a lecturer in his thirties, takes a week at the English seaside resort he was brought to as a boy. His marriage to Meg has ended,...
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The Conservationist
Mehring is a wealthy white industrialist in South Africa who has bought a four hundred acre farm outside Johannesburg. He does not need it and does...
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A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories
Twenty four stories, and Singer's two worlds sit in them side by side: the vanished Jewish Poland of dybbuks, disputations and market town...
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Gravity's Rainbow
London, December 1944, under the V-2s: the rockets arrive faster than sound, so the explosion comes first and the scream after, death preceding its...
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The Denial of Death
Ernest Becker's central claim is disarmingly simple to state and enormous in its implications: human beings know they are going to die, cannot bear...
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The Americans: The Democratic Experience
Daniel J. Boorstin closes his trilogy on American history with The Americans: The Democratic Experience, which follows ordinary life in the United...
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O'Neill, Son and Artist
Louis Sheaffer's second volume follows Eugene O'Neill from the point his first volume, Son and Playwright, left off, an aspiring dramatist newly...
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Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian
Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote the most read work of history in the English nineteenth century, and John Clive's biography asks the question a...
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The Dolphin
The Dolphin is the last of three related books Robert Lowell published in 1973, and the only one made entirely of new poems rather than revised...
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Rendezvous with Rama
In 2131 an object enters the solar system on a hyperbolic path. It is fifty kilometers long, twenty across, perfectly cylindrical, spinning, and...
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The Dispossessed
Anarres is a dry moon settled a hundred and seventy years ago by anarchists who were given a barren world to leave the rich one alone. There is no...
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Dance Hall of the Dead
Two boys are missing in the high desert where the Zuni and Navajo reservations meet: Ernesto Cata, a Zuni chosen for the honor and burden of...
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The Slave Dancer
Thirteen year old Jessie Bollier, a poor white boy in 1840s New Orleans known around his neighborhood for his skill on the fife, is kidnapped off...
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Duffy and the Devil
Harve Zemach retells a Cornish variant of the Rumpelstiltskin story, drawn from Cornish folklore. Duffy, a lazy servant girl hired to spin and knit...
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Aniara
Aniara is a poem, not a novel, one hundred and three cantos telling the story of a spacecraft that never reaches its destination. The ship carries...
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Return to Ithaca
Eyvind Johnson retells the last stretch of Odysseus's nineteen year absence from Ithaca, and strips away nearly everything heroic about it....
What Shaped 1974
The Pynchon decision is the most famous refusal in the prize's history and has done far more for the novel's reputation than a win would have. Pynchon, who never appears in public, sent a comedian to collect his National Book Award and had him deliver a nonsense speech. The Nobel that year went jointly to two Swedish writers who were themselves members of the Academy, a choice widely criticized at the time. Nixon resigned in August.
Published in 1974, 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 selectionCarrie
Carrie White, sixteen and relentlessly bullied at her Chamberlain, Maine high school, gets her first period in the girls' locker room shower with...
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Curated selectionTinker Tailor Soldier Spy
George Smiley, forced into retirement from British Intelligence after a botched operation in Czechoslovakia, is quietly brought back by a...