Award
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize honors outstanding achievements in journalism, literature, and music by American creators, recognizing works of exceptional merit and cultural significance. Each award includes a prize of $15,000 USD.
2025
FIction
James
In James, Percival Everett reimagines the story of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who escapes down the Mississippi River alongside Huck. Now at the center of the narrative, James reveals a life far more complex than the one seen through Huck’s eyes—one...
2024
FIction
Night Watch
In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t...
2023
FIction
Demon Copperhead
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing...
Trust
Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of...
2022
FIction
The Netanyahus
Set in a small American college town in the late 1950s, The Netanyahus is narrated by Ruben Blum, a mild-mannered history professor who finds his quiet academic life disrupted when he is assigned to host Benzion Netanyahu, a visiting Israeli scholar under consideration for a faculty position. Along...
2021
FIction
The Night Watchman
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with...
2020
FIction
The Nickel Boys
When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite...
2019
FIction
The Overstory
An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back...
2018
FIction
Less
Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On...
2017
FIction
The Underground Railroad
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity...
2016
FIction
The Sympathizer
Told as a confession, The Sympathizer follows a nameless narrator—a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist double agent—who lives between worlds during and after the fall of Saigon. Embedded within the South Vietnamese army while secretly reporting to the North, he witnesses the chaotic final days...
2015
FIction
All the Light We Cannot See
Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way...
2014
FIction
The Goldfinch
Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented...
2013
FIction
The Orphan Master's Son
Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs a work camp for orphans. Superiors in the North Korean state soon recognize the boy’s loyalty and keen instincts. Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the...
2011
FIction
A Visit From the Goon Squad
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a novel told through a series of interconnected stories that move across time, place, and perspective, centering on the music industry and the lives it shapes. At its core are Bennie Salazar, a record executive grappling with the erosion of his once-passionate...
2010
FIction
Tinkers
As George Washington Crosby lies dying in his living room, time begins to blur, and memories rise and fall like fragments of a dream. Confined to his bed, he drifts through recollections of his own life—his work as a clock repairman, his family, and the quiet routines that shaped his days—while the...
2009
FIction
Olive Kitteridge
At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge...
2008
FIction
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has...
2007
FIction
The Road
In a bleak, ash-covered world where civilization has collapsed, a father and his young son travel south along a desolate road, searching for warmth, safety, and any sign of life. The cause of the devastation is unknown, but its effects are absolute: cities lie in ruins, food is scarce, and danger...
2006
FIction
March
While his wife and daughters remain at home, Mr. March leaves Concord, Massachusetts to serve as a Union chaplain during the American Civil War. Idealistic and driven by strong moral convictions, he enters the conflict believing in the righteousness of the cause. But as he witnesses the brutal...
2005
FIction
Gilead
In the quiet town of Gilead, Iowa, aging Congregationalist minister John Ames begins writing a long letter to his young son, knowing he will not live to see the boy grow up. Reflecting on his life, Ames recounts his family history—rooted in generations of preachers—as well as the events,...
2004
FIction
The Known World
Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at...
2003
FIction
Middlesex
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license......
2002
FIction
Empire Falls
Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it’s Janine, Miles’...
2001
FIction
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash...
2000
FIction
Interpreter of Maladies
Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of stories that explore the lives of Indian and Indian American characters navigating the spaces between cultures, relationships, and identities. Set in both India and the United States, the stories follow individuals and families as they confront loneliness,...
1999
FIction
The Hours
The Hours is the story of three women: Clarissa Vaughan, a beloved friend of an ailing poet, who one fine New York morning goes about planning a party in his honor; Laura Brown, who in a 1950s Los Angeles suburb slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home; and Virginia Woolf,...
1998
FIction
American Pastoral
Seymour “Swede” Levov appears to have achieved the ideal American life. A former high school athlete admired for his charm and success, he builds a prosperous business, marries a beauty queen, and settles into a peaceful existence in rural New Jersey. To those around him, he embodies the promise of...
1997
FIction
Martin Dressler
In late 19th-century New York City, Martin Dressler rises from humble beginnings as the son of a cigar shop owner to become an ambitious and visionary entrepreneur. Driven by imagination and relentless determination, he quickly moves beyond his modest origins, seizing opportunities in the rapidly...
1996
FIction
Independence Day
Frank Bascombe, Book 2
Over the course of a long Fourth of July weekend, Frank Bascombe—a former sportswriter turned real estate agent—navigates the complexities of his midlife existence. Living in suburban New Jersey after a divorce, Frank tries to maintain a sense of calm detachment from the disappointments and...
1995
FIction
The Stone Diaries
Daisy Goodwill Flett’s life unfolds across the 20th century, from her unusual birth in rural Canada to her later years reflecting on the choices and circumstances that shaped her. Through a series of shifting perspectives—letters, memories, and fragments of narrative—the novel pieces together the...
1994
FIction
The Shipping News
At thirty-six, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman, is wrenched violently out of his world when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. He retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters all play a part in...
1993
FIction
A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is a collection of interconnected stories centered on Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana after the Vietnam War. Each story offers a different perspective, capturing the quiet struggles and inner lives of individuals as they adjust to a new country while...
1992
FIction
A Thousand Acres
On a prosperous farm in Iowa, Larry Cook decides to divide his vast land among his three daughters, an act that sets off a chain of events that will fracture the family. Ginny and Rose, the two eldest, accept their shares, while the youngest, Caroline, refuses, sparking tension that quickly...
1991
FIction
Rabbit At Rest
Rabbit Angstrom, Book 4
Rabbit’s son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in midlife to become a working girl.
As, through the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush,...
1990
FIction
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
In 1940s New York City, Cuban brothers Cesar and Nestor Castillo arrive with dreams of making their mark through music. Forming the Mambo Kings band, they find moments of success playing in clubs and dance halls, riding the vibrant wave of Latin music sweeping the city. Nestor, the quieter and more...
1989
FIction
Breathing Lessons
Unfolding over the course of a single emotionally fraught day, this stunning novel encompasses a lifetime of dreams, regrets and reckonings—and is often regarded as Tyler's seminal work.
Maggie and Ira Moran are on a road trip from Baltimore, Maryland to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania to attend the...
1988
FIction
Beloved
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been...
1987
FIction
A Summons to Memphis
During the twilight of a Sunday afternoon in March, New York book editor Phillip Carver receives an urgent phone call from each of his older, unmarried sisters. They plead with Phillip to help avert their widower father's impending remarriage to a younger woman. Hesitant to get embroiled in a family...
1986
FIction
Lonesome Dove
In a small Texas border town, two former Texas Rangers—Augustus “Gus” McCrae and Woodrow Call—run a quiet cattle outfit, their adventurous days seemingly behind them. But when the opportunity arises to drive a herd north to the untamed lands of Montana, Call seizes the chance for one last great...
1985
FIction
Foreign Affairs
Virginia Miner, a fifty-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about children’s folk rhymes. Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying...
1984
FIction
Ironweed
Francis Phelan has hit bottom. More than twenty years ago, the ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, and full-time bum with the gift of gab left Albany after a tragic accident. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town and faced with the wife and home he abandoned, roaming the old familiar streets,...
1983
FIction
The Color Purple
Told through a series of letters, The Color Purple follows Celie, a young Black woman growing up in the rural American South in the early 20th century. Subjected to abuse and separated from her sister Nettie, Celie endures years of hardship and silence, believing she has little control over her own...
1982
FIction
Rabbit Is Rich
Rabbit Angstrom, Book 3
The hero of John Updike's *Rabbit, Run* (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in *Rabbit Redux* (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines...
1981
FIction
A Confederacy of Dunces
In the vibrant streets of New Orleans, Ignatius J. Reilly lives with his long-suffering mother, railing against modern society from the comfort of his cluttered bedroom. Armed with a sharp tongue, a medieval worldview, and an inflated sense of his own intellect, Ignatius considers himself a defender...
1980
FIction
The Executioner's Song
Based on real events, The Executioner’s Song traces the life and death of Gary Gilmore, a man who, after being released from prison in 1976, quickly returns to a pattern of violence. His crimes lead to a highly publicized conviction, but it is his response that captures national attention: Gilmore...
1979
FIction
The Stories of John Cheever
The Stories of John Cheever brings together a wide-ranging collection of short fiction that captures the rhythms and contradictions of mid-20th-century American life. Set largely in suburban communities and urban enclaves, the stories follow men and women navigating marriage, work, ambition, and...
1978
FIction
Elbow Room
A beautiful collection of short stories that explores blacks and whites today, *Elbow Room* is alive with warmth and humor. Bold and very real, these twelve stories examine a world we all know but find difficult to define.
Whether a story dashes the bravado of young street toughs or pierces through...
1976
FIction
Humboldt's Gift
Charlie Citrine, a successful writer and intellectual, reflects on his life in the shadow of his former mentor, the brilliant but troubled poet Von Humboldt Fleisher. Once celebrated, Humboldt has fallen into obscurity and instability, while Charlie has achieved fame and financial success—though not...
1975
FIction
The Killer Angels
In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history, two armies fought for two conflicting dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love.
And far more...
1973
FIction
The Optimist's Daughter
When Judge McKelva suffers a sudden illness during a trip to New Orleans, his daughter Laurel returns home to be with him—only to find herself in the uncomfortable company of his much younger second wife, Fay. After his death, Laurel accompanies Fay back to Mississippi, where tensions between them...
1972
FIction
Angle of Repose
Confined to a wheelchair and struggling with his own failed marriage, historian Lyman Ward retreats to his grandparents’ old home in California to write about their lives. Through letters, journals, and memories, he reconstructs the story of his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, a talented artist who...
1970
FIction
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford brings together a wide range of short fiction that explores the inner lives of individuals navigating social expectations, personal insecurities, and the quiet tensions of everyday life. Set in varied landscapes—from the American West to East Coast cities—the...
1969
FIction
House Made of Dawn
Abel, a young Native American man, returns to his home in New Mexico after serving in World War II, but finds himself unable to reconnect with the life he once knew. Alienated and disoriented, he struggles to find his place within his community, caught between traditional ways of life and the...
1968
FIction
The Confessions of Nat Turner
In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery... The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to...
1967
FIction
The Fixer
Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of...
1966
FIction
The Collected Stories Of Katherine Anne Porter
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter compiles three books of her short fiction into one. This National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning volume showcases her remarkable talent.
From the gothic Old South to revolutionary Mexico, few writers have evoked such a multitude of worlds, both...
1965
FIction
The Keepers of the House
Entrenched on the same land since the early 1800s, the Howlands have, for seven generations, been pillars of their Southern community. Extraordinary family lore has been passed down to Abigail Howland, but not all of it.
When shocking facts come to light about her late grandfather William’s...
1963
FIction
The Reivers
Set in early 20th-century Mississippi, The Reivers follows eleven-year-old Lucius Priest as he embarks on what begins as an innocent adventure but quickly becomes a journey into the complexities of adulthood. When Lucius is taken along by the family’s Black servant, Ned McCaslin, and a roguish hired...
1962
FIction
The Edge of Sadness
Father Hugh Kennedy, a Catholic priest in Boston, returns to parish life after a period of personal and spiritual struggle. Once sidelined by alcoholism, he is given a quiet assignment intended to ease him back into his vocation. As he resumes his duties, he reconnects with the Carmody family, whose...
1961
FIction
To Kill a Mockingbird
In the small town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression, young Scout Finch grows up alongside her brother Jem under the watchful guidance of their father, Atticus, a principled lawyer. Through long summers and quiet school days, the children become fascinated by their reclusive neighbor,...
1960
FIction
Advise and Consent
When the President nominates Robert A. Leffingwell as Secretary of State, what appears to be a routine confirmation quickly becomes a political battleground in the United States Senate. Questions about Leffingwell’s past, his ideology, and his suitability for the role ignite intense debate, drawing...
1959
FIction
The Travels of Jaimie Mcpheeters
Told through the voice of young Jaimie McPheeters, the novel follows a lively and often perilous journey across the American West during the Gold Rush era. Traveling with his restless and unreliable father, Jaimie leaves behind the familiar for a world of wagon trains, frontier towns, and...
1958
FIction
A Death in the Family
Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the early 20th century, A Death in the Family follows the quiet, close-knit Follet family as their lives are suddenly shattered by tragedy. When Jay Follet is killed in an accident, his wife Mary and their young children are left to confront a loss that alters the...
1956
FIction
Andersonville
Set during the American Civil War, Andersonville centers on the notorious Confederate prison camp in Georgia, where thousands of Union soldiers are held under brutal and deteriorating conditions. Through a wide cast of characters—prisoners, guards, civilians, and officials—the novel paints a...
1955
FIction
A Fable
Set during World War I on the Western Front, A Fable centers on a mysterious French corporal who leads a group of soldiers in a quiet but radical act of defiance: they refuse to continue fighting. Their unexpected mutiny briefly halts the war, disrupting the machinery of conflict and drawing the...
1953
FIction
The Old Man and the Sea
Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman, has gone eighty-four days without catching a single fish. Dismissed as unlucky by others and pitied by those who know him, he remains determined to prove his skill and endurance. Setting out alone into the Gulf Stream, he ventures farther than usual, driven by...
1952
FIction
The Caine Mutiny
Willie Keith, a carefree young man from a privileged background, joins the U.S. Navy during World War II expecting adventure but little responsibility. Assigned to the aging minesweeper USS Caine, he gradually matures under the pressures of military life. When the ship receives a new commanding...
1951
FIction
The Town
The Awakening Land, Book 3
Set in the growing settlement of Americus in the early 19th century, The Town follows Sayward Wheeler and her family as they witness the transformation of a once-rugged frontier into an organized community. Having endured the hardships of pioneer life, Sayward now finds herself navigating the...
1950
FIction
The Way West
In the mid-19th century, a wagon train sets out from Missouri toward the promise of Oregon, led by experienced frontiersman Dick Summers. Among the travelers is Lije Evans, a restless farmer seeking a better life for his family, along with others drawn by dreams of land, opportunity, and a fresh...
1949
FIction
Guard Of Honor
At a major Army Air Forces base in Florida during World War II, a single weekend becomes a crucible for leadership, responsibility, and the hidden strains of command. As officers prepare for a high-profile visit, a series of unexpected crises unfolds—ranging from racial tensions among troops to...
1948
FIction
Tales of the South Pacific
Tales of the South Pacific is a collection of interconnected stories set among U.S. military personnel and island communities during World War II. Drawing on his own experiences, Michener portrays life in the Pacific theater beyond the front lines, capturing the routines, relationships, and tensions...