The year in prizes
1977 Book Award Winners
15 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Paul Scott won the Booker for Staying On and Irving Howe took the National Book Award for non fiction with World of Our Fathers. Mildred D. Taylor won the Newbery Medal for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and Vicente Aleixandre received the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Staying On
Tusker and Lucy Smalley stayed. When the British left India in 1947 the Smalleys, a colonel who never rose and a wife who never had the life she...
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The Spectator Bird
Joe Allston is a retired literary agent in his seventies, living in the California hills with his wife Ruth, cataloguing his ailments with bitter...
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Song of Solomon
An insurance agent named Robert Smith steps off the roof of a Michigan hospital, trying to fly, and in the crowd below Ruth Dead goes into labor....
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Beautiful Swimmers
William Warner built Beautiful Swimmers around the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, whose scientific name, Callinectes sapidus, joins the Greek for...
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The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861
David M. Potter spent much of his career studying the sectional crisis that led to the Civil War, and The Impending Crisis gathers that lifetime of...
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A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence
John E. Mack's biography follows T. E. Lawrence from his 1888 birth in Tremadog, Wales, the illegitimate son of an Anglo Irish baronet and his...
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World of Our Fathers
World of Our Fathers tells the story of the two million East European Jews who came to America between 1880 and 1920, and of the world they built...
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Divine Comedies
Divine Comedies gathers a set of polished, formally accomplished domestic lyrics, poems of travel, friendship, and daily life written in James...
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Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
The Sumners are a large, wealthy, interlocked family in the Shenandoah Valley, and by the early 1970s of this novel's world they can read the...
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Gateway
The Heechee left. Nobody knows why, or where, or what they looked like. What they left behind is a hollowed asteroid parked near the sun containing...
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Doctor Rat
Doctor Rat is a laboratory rat who has been driven mad by the experiments performed on him and has decided to love them. He runs his mazes, sings...
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Promised Land
Harv Shepard, a Cape Cod real estate man with a face full of worry, hires Spenser for the oldest job on the books: find my wife. Pam Shepard has...
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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
Nine year old Cassie Logan narrates a year in the life of her family, one of the rare Black families in Depression era Mississippi who own their...
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Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions
Margaret Musgrove, publishing her first book, built an alphabet around twenty six African peoples, one for each letter from A to Z, opening with...
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Destruction or Love
This is a poetry collection, written in 1932 and 1933 and first published a few years later, and it has no plot to summarize, only an argument the...
What Shaped 1977
Howe's history follows the two million Yiddish speaking Jews who left Eastern Europe for New York, and the scholarly book became a surprise national bestseller, a monument to the world of the Lower East Side. Taylor's novel of a Black family holding on to their land in Depression era Mississippi became one of the most taught American children's books. In January the television adaptation of Roots was watched by an estimated one hundred and thirty million Americans over eight nights.
Published in 1977, 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 selectionDispatches
Herr arrived in Vietnam in late 1967 as a correspondent for Esquire and returned to New York the following autumn, and Dispatches gathers what he...
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Curated selectionThe Shining
Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic and failed writer whose temper has already cost him a teaching job after he beat a student he caught slashing...