Pulitzer Prize for Fiction by Pulitzer Prize
All the books that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction from 1918 to the present.
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His Family by Ernest Poole
His Family tells the story of a middle class family in New York City in the 1910s. The family's patriarch, widower Roger Gale, struggles to deal with the way his daughters and grandchildren respond...
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The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
The novel and trilogy traces the growth of the United States through the declining fortunes of three generations of the aristocratic Amberson family in a fictional Midwestern town, between the end ...
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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence centers on an upperclass couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of a scandalous woman whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assump...
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Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington
This is the story of a middle-class family living in the industrialized midland country at the turn of the 20th century. It is against this dingy backdrop that Alice Adams seeks to distinguish hers...
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One of Ours by Willa Cather
Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the y...
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The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson
The Able McLaughlins, Scotch Covenanters, devoted to one another, deeply pious, but humor-loving and full of the emotion and sentiment which exists under the craggy Scotch exterior, are leaders in ...
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So Big by Edna Ferber
Winner of the 1925 Pulitzer Prize, So Big is widely regarded as Ferber's piece de resistance. This rollicking panorama of high and low life in the Windy City follows the travails of gambler's da...
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Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
Arrowsmith tells the story of bright and scientifically-minded Martin Arrowsmith as he makes his way from a small town in the Midwest to the upper echelons of the scientific community. (He is born ...
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Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield
Early Autumn is a 1926 novel by Louis Bromfield. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1927.
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The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is American author Thornton Wilder's second novel, first published in 1927 to worldwide acclaim. It tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse...
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Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin
Scarlet Sister Mary is set among the gullah people in the Low Country of South Carolina or Georgia. The date is never clearly established, but appears to be around the beginning of the twentieth ce...
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Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge
Capturing the essence of the Southwest in 1915, Oliver La Farge's Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel is an enduring American classic. At a ceremonial dance, the young, earnest silversmith Laughing ...
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Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes
Years of Grace is a 1930 novel by Margaret Ayer Barnes. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1931.
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The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
The moving story of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his selfless wife O-lan, in which the author presents a graphic view of a China when the last emperor reigned and the vast political and social u...
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The Store by Thomas Sigismund Stribling
The Store is a 1932 novel by Thomas Sigismund Stribling. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1933. It is the second book of the Viadan trilogy, comprising The Forge, The Store, and Unfinishe...
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Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller
A young couple begins their married lives on the eve of the Civil War. The story of the poor people of the American South who never owned a slave nor planned to fight a war.
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Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson
Johnson's (1910-1990) Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, a combination of social protest and naturalism originally published in 1934, is narrated by the second of three daughters in a farming fami...
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Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis
In this epic work by award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist H.L. Davis, the virtues of the frontier live again in the lives and characters of Oregon settlers during the homesteading period from...
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Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Gone With the Wind is set in Jonesboro and Atlanta, Georgia during the American Civil War and Reconstruction and follows the life of Scarlett O'Hara, the daughter of an Irish immigrant plantation o...
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The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that charts the diminishing fortunes of a distinguished Boston family in the early years of the 20th century. Sweeping us into the inner sanctum of Boston society, ...
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The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The timeless story of backwoods Florida and the tender relationship of a young boy and his tame fawn continues to delight and enthrall readers.
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The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. In a ...
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In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow
In This Our Life is a 1941 novel by Ellen Glasgow. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942.
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Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair
The Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a great American writer portrays the men and women caught in an onslaught of terror, a holocaust from which few escape. Lanny Budd became involved in what the...
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Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin
Journey in the Dark is a 1943 novel by Martin Flavin. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1944.
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A Bell for Adano by John Hersey
A Bell for Adano is a 1944 novel by John Hersey, the winner of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. It tells the story of an Italian-American officer in Sicily during World War II who wins the re...
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All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
All the King's Men portrays the dramatic political ascent and governorship of Willie Stark, a driven, cynical populist in the American South during the 1930s.
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Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
Tales of the South Pacific is a Pulitzer Prize winning collection of sequentially related short stories about World War II, written by James A. Michener in 1946. The stories were based on observati...
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Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens
Guard of Honor is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by James Gould Cozzens published in 1948. The novel is set during World War II, with most of the action occurring on or near a fictional Army Air Fo...
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The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr
Former senator William Tadlock leads a wagon train from along the Oregon Trail from Missouri with the help of hired guide Dick Summers. After several accidents which cost settlers lives, a mutiny o...
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The Town by Conrad Richter
The Town is part of the The Awakening Land trilogy, which traces the transformation of Ohio from wilderness to farmland to the site of modern industrial civilization, all in the lifetime of one cha...
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The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
The Caine Mutiny is a 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Herman Wouk. The novel grew out of Wouk's personal experiences aboard a destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific in World War II and deals wit...
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The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordea...
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A Fable by William Faulkner
A Fable is a novel written in 1954 by the American author William Faulkner, which won him both the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award in 1955. Despite these recognitions, however, the novel...
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Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
Andersonville is a novel by MacKinlay Kantor concerning the Confederate prisoner of war camp, Andersonville prison, during the American Civil War (1861–1865). The novel was originally published in ...
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A Death in the Family by James Agee
A Death in the Family is an autobiographical novel by author James Agee, set in Knoxville, Tennessee. He began writing it in 1948, but it was not quite complete when he died in 1955. It was edited ...
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The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor
Taylor's realistic novel -- despite the Tom-Sawyer-like protagonist and narrator, it is aimed at an adult audience and contains episodes that would have kept it off any school list at the time -- w...
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Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
Advise and Consent is a 1959 political novel written by Allen Drury which explores the reactions of those in and around the United States Senate to the controversial nomination of Robert Leffingwel...
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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
As a Southern Gothic novel and a Bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence. Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses is...
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The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1962, this haunting novel shattered reigning cultural stereotypes of priests and parish life when it was first published. Father Hugh Kennedy is a recov...
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The Reivers by William Faulkner
This grand misadventure is the story of three unlikely thieves, or reivers: 11-year-old Lucius Priest and two of his family's retainers. In 1905, these three set out from Mississippi for Memphis in...
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The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau
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 Howl...
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The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter was an anthology of the work of Katherine Anne Porter. The collection of 19 short stories and long stories won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the ...
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The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
The Fixer is a 1966 novel by Bernard Malamud inspired by the true story of Menahem Mendel Beilis, an unjustly imprisoned Jew in Tsarist Russia. The notorious "Beilis trial" of 1913 caused an intern...
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The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
The novel is based on an extant document, the "confession" of Turner to the white lawyer Thomas Gray. In the historical confessions, Turner claims to have been divinely inspired, charged with a mis...
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House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
House Made of Dawn is a novel by N. Scott Momaday, widely credited as leading the way for the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for F...
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The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford is a short story collection by Jean Stafford. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970.
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Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Angle of Repose tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, in the S...
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The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
The Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winning 1972 short novel by Eudora Welty. It concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKe...
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The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
The Killer Angels (1974) is a historical novel by Michael Shaara that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. The book tells the story of four days of the Battle of Gettysburg in the Am...
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Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
Humboldt's Gift is a 1975 novel by Saul Bellow, which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and contributed to Bellow's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year. The novel, which Bell...
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Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
Elbow Room is a 1977 short story collection by American author James Alan McPherson. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1978.
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The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
The Stories of John Cheever is a 1978 short story collection by American author John Cheever. It contains some of his most famous stories, including "The Enormous Radio," "Goodbye, My Brother," "Th...
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The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
The Executioner's Song is a 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Norman Mailer that depicts the events surrounding the execution of Gary Gilmore by the state of Utah for murder. The title of the bo...
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A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel written by John Kennedy Toole, published in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide. The book was published through the efforts of writer Walker Perc...
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Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
Rabbit Is Rich is a 1981 novel by John Updike. It is the third novel of the four-part series which begins with Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, and concludes with Rabbit At Rest. There is also a relat...
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The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on female black life during the 1930s in the Southern United States, addressing the numerous issues including their exceedingly low position ...
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Ironweed by William Kennedy
Ironweed is set during the Great Depression and tells the story of Francis Phelan, an alcoholic vagrant originally from Albany, New York, who left his family after accidentally killing his infant s...
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Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
Foreign Affairs is a novel by Alison Lurie. It concerns itself with American academics in England. Unmarried, fifty-four year-old Virginia Miner (Vinnie), a professor at Corinth University who s...
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Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Lonesome Dove, written by Larry McMurtry, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning western novel and the first published book of the Lonesome Dove series. The story focuses on the relationship of several retire...
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A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
A Summons to Memphis is a 1986 novel by Peter Taylor which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1987. It is the recollection of Phillip Carver, a middle aged editor from New York City, who is summ...
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Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beloved (1987) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. The novel, her fifth, is loosely based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner, about whom Morrison...
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Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
Breathing Lessons is a 1988 novel by American author Anne Tyler. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was also Time Magazine's book of the year. It describes joys and pains of the o...
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The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
It is about the lives of two Cuban brothers and musicians, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, who immigrate to the United States and settle in New York City in the early 1950s. The novel won the Pulitze...
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Rabbit at Rest by John Updike
In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behavi...
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A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Larry Cook is an aging farmer who decides to incorporate his farm, handing complete and joint ownership to his three daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. When the youngest daughter objects, she is...
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A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is a 1992 collection of short stories by Robert Olen Butler. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993. Each story in the collection is narrated by ...
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The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
The story centers on Quoyle, a newspaper worker from upstate New York whose father had emigrated from Newfoundland. Shortly after the suicide of his parents, Quoyle's unfaithful and abusive wife Pe...
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The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
It is the fictional autobiography about the life of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirt...
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Independence Day by Richard Ford
Independence Day follows Frank Bascombe, a New Jersey real estate agent, through the titular holiday weekend as he visits his ex-wife, his troubled son, his current lover, the renters of one of his...
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Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer is a 1996 novel by Steven Millhauser. It won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Millhauser told an interviewer that winning the Pulitzer Prize wou...
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American Pastoral by Philip Roth
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a Jewish-American businessman and former high school athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper...
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The Hours by Michael Cunningham
The Hours is a 1998 novel written by Michael Cunningham. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 movie of ...
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Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Interpreter of Maladies is a 2000 collection of nine short stories by Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. It was also...
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a 2000 novel by American author Michael Chabon that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. The novel follows the lives of the title characters, a C...
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Empire Falls by Richard Russo
A small, fictional mill town in Maine called Empire Falls, though once booming in industry, is quickly deteriorating. Owned by the powerful Whiting family, the town can no longer sustain itself. Se...
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Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Middlesex is a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. It was published in 2002 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003. The narrator and protagonist, Calliope Stephanides (later called "Cal"), an in...
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The Known World by Edward P. Jones
The Known World is a 2003 historical novel by Edward P. Jones. It was his first novel and second book. Set in antebellum Virginia, it examines issues regarding the ownership of black slaves by free...
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Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Gilead is a novel written by Marilynne Robinson and published in 2004. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel is the fictional auto...
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March by Geraldine Brooks
Mr. March, an abolitionist and chaplain, is driven by his conscience to leave his home and family in Concord, Massachusetts in order to participate in the war. During this time, March writes letter...
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blast...
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) is a best-selling novel written by Dominican-American author Junot Díaz. Although a work of fiction, the novel is set in New Jersey where Díaz was raised...
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Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Olive Kitteridge (2008) is a novel by American author Elizabeth Strout. It is a collection of 13 connected short stories about a woman named Olive and her immediate family and friends in the town o...
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Tinkers by Paul Harding
An old man lies dying. As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. At on...
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A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an ageing former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Benni...
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The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel by Adam Johnson
The son of an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jon...
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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Al...
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All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with their respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.
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The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties.
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The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad, published in 2016, is the sixth novel by American author Colson Whitehead. The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora and Caesar, two slaves in the southeaster...
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Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Less is a satirical comedy novel by American author Andrew Sean Greer, following gay author Arthur Less as he travels the world on a literary tour. The book covers themes such as romantic love, ...
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The Overstory by Richard Powers
The Overstory is a novel by Richard Powers published in 2018 by W.W. Norton. It is Powers's twelfth novel. The novel is about nine Americans whose unique life experiences with trees bring them toge...
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The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
The Nickel Boys is a 2019 novel by American novelist and writer Colson Whitehead.
