The year in prizes
1976 Book Award Winners
16 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Saul Bellow won the Pulitzer for Humboldt's Gift and the Nobel Prize in Literature in the same year. John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror took the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and David Storey won the Booker for Saville.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Humboldt's Gift
Charlie Citrine is rich, famous, in his fifties and being taken apart. He made a great deal of money from a Broadway hit and has spent the years...
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Saville
Colin Saville is born in the late 1930s in a South Yorkshire mining village, the second son of a miner who has decided that his children will not...
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J R
J R Vansant is eleven, a sixth grader on Long Island with a runny nose, unwashed sneakers and no discernible home life, and he assembles, entirely...
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October Light
James Page is an old Vermont farmer, miserly, stooped and rock poor, working a hill place on Prospect Mountain. His sister Sally, eighty, has moved...
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Why Survive? Being Old in America
Robert Butler wrote Why Survive? Being Old in America as a direct indictment of how the United States treated its elderly citizens in the middle of...
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Lamy of Santa Fe
Paul Horgan's second Pulitzer winning book, a biography, follows Jean Baptiste Lamy from his birth in 1814 in Lempdes, France, through seminary...
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Edith Wharton: A Biography
R. W. B. Lewis's biography follows Edith Wharton from her 1862 birth as Edith Newbold Jones into one of Manhattan's oldest and wealthiest families,...
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The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution is the central panel of David Brion Davis's great trilogy on slavery in Western thought, and it...
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Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
The book's long title poem takes as its subject a painting: Parmigianino's sixteenth century self portrait, painted onto a curved wooden panel to...
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The Forever War
William Mandella is conscripted under an elite draft that takes the most educated young people on Earth and sends them to fight the Taurans, an...
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Man Plus
The United States is going to Mars, not out of ambition but because the geopolitical situation has deteriorated to the point where a national...
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Bid Time Return
Richard Collier is thirty six, a writer, and dying of an inoperable brain tumor. He checks into the Hotel del Coronado, a grand old resort hotel,...
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Hopscotch
Miles Kendig has spent his working life as one of the CIA's best field men, and the agency's reward is a desk: too old for operations, too...
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The Grey King
Will Stanton, the youngest of the immortal Old Ones sworn to defend the world against the rising power of the Dark, arrives in Wales to recover...
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Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears
Verna Aardema retells a West African cumulative folktale that traces an entire night's chaos back to a single small lie. A mosquito tells an iguana...
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Herzog
Moses Herzog, forty seven, scholar of Romanticism, twice divorced, is coming apart in the most articulate way imaginable: he writes letters....
What Shaped 1976
Ashbery's sweep of all three major American poetry prizes in one year has never been repeated, and it moved a difficult experimental poet to the center of American letters more or less overnight. Bellow's double, a Pulitzer and a Nobel in the same twelve months, is equally rare. The country spent that summer on its bicentennial, marking two hundred years while still absorbing Watergate and the end of the war.
Published in 1976, 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 selectionInterview with the Vampire
In a small room in modern San Francisco, a vampire named Louis de Pointe du Lac tells his two hundred year story to a young reporter, a framing...
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Curated selectionThe Selfish Gene
Dawkins argues for what he calls a gene's eye view of evolution, that natural selection acts most fundamentally on genes rather than on individual...