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Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded since 1948 for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. It replaced the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel.
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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 and deals explicitly with his ancestral homeland's...
The Road
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 blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed all...
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March
March is a novel by Geraldine Brooks. It is a parallel novel that retells Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women from the point of view of Alcott's protagonists' absent father. Brooks has inserted the novel into the classic tale, revealing the...
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Gilead
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 autobiography of the Reverend John Ames, an elderly...
The Known World
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 black people as well as by whites. A book with many...
Middlesex
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 intersexed person of Greek descent, has 5-alpha-reductase...
Empire Falls
Empire Falls is a 2001 novel written by Richard Russo. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2002.
A small, fictional mill town in Maine called Empire Falls, though once booming in industry, is quickly deteriorating. Owned by the powerful Whiting...
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
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 Czech artist named Joe Kavalier and a Brooklyn-born...
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Interpreter of Maladies
Interpreter of Maladies is a 2000 book collection of nine short stories by Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and has sold over 15 million copies worldwide. It was also...
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The Hours
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 the same name starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep...
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American Pastoral
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 middle class life is ruined by the domestic social...
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
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 would not change his life one bit — "I dare it to," he...
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Independence Day
Independence Day is a 1995 novel by Richard Ford and the sequel to Ford's 1986 novel The Sportswriter.
It won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1996, the first novel ever to win both awards in a single year.
Independence Day...
The Stone Diaries
The Stone Diaries is a 1993 award winning novel 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...
The Shipping News
The Shipping News is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning novel by E. Annie Proulx which was published in 1993. It was adapted into a film of the same name, released in 2001.
The story centers on Quoyle, a newspaper worker from upstate...
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
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 a different Vietnamese immigrant living in the U.S....
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A Thousand Acres
A Thousand Acres is a 1991 novel by American author Jane Smiley. It won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted to a 1997 film of the same name.
The novel is a contemporary deconstruction of Shakespeare's King Lear and is set on a...
Rabbit At Rest
Rabbit at Rest is a 1990 novel by John Updike. It is the fourth and final novel in a series beginning with Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, and Rabbit is Rich. There is also a related 2001 novella, Rabbit Remembered. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for...
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is a 1989 novel 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...
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Breathing Lessons
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 ordinary marriage of Ira and Maggie Moran as they travel...
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Beloved
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 later wrote in the opera Margaret Garner (2005)....
A Summons to Memphis
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 summoned back to Memphis by his two conniving unmarried...
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Lonesome Dove
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 retired Texas Rangers and their adventures driving a...
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Foreign Affairs
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 specializes in children's literature, is off to London...
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Ironweed
Ironweed is a 1983 novel by William Kennedy. It received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is part of Kennedy's Albany Cycle. It placed at number ninety-two on the Modern Library list of the 100 Best Novels written in English in the 20th...
The Color Purple
The Color Purple is an acclaimed 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker. It received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name.
Taking place mostly...
Rabbit Is Rich
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 related 2001 novella, Rabbit Remembered. Rabbit Is Rich...
A Confederacy of Dunces
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 Percy (who also contributed a revealing foreword) and...
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The Executioner's Song
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 book may be a play on "The Lord High Executioner's...
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The Stories of 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," "The Country Husband," "The Five-Forty-Eight" and "The...
Elbow Room
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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Humboldt's Gift
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 Bellow intended to be a short story, is a roman à clef...
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The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War
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 American Civil War: June 30, 1863, as the troops of...
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The Optimist's Daughter
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 McKelva, after he has surgery for a detached retina. He...
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The Collected Stories of 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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House Made of Dawn
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 Fiction in 1969.
With 198 pages, House Made of Dawn...
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The Confessions of Nat Turner
The Confessions of Nat Turner is a 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by U.S. writer William Styron. Presented as a first-person narrative by historic figure Nat Turner, the novel is based on the slave revolt in Virginia in 1831.
The novel is based...
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The Fixer
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 international uproar that forced Russia to back down in...
The Collected Stories of 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 National Book Award in 1966. In the preface "Go...
The Keepers of the House
The Keepers of the House is a 1964 novel by Shirley Ann Grau set in rural Alabama and covering seven generations of the Howland family that lived in the same house and built a community around themselves. As such, it is a metaphor for the long...
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The Reivers
The Reivers, published in 1962, is the last novel by the American author William Faulkner. The bestselling novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963. Faulkner previously won this award for his book A Fable, making him one of only...
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The Edge of Sadness
The Edge of Sadness is a novel by the American author Edwin O'Connor. It was published in 1961 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1962. The story is about a middle-aged Catholic priest in New England.
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To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was instantly successful and has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on the author's observations of...
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Advise and Consent: A Novel of Washington Politics
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 Leffingwell, a former Communist Party member, to be United...
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The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel written by Robert Lewis Taylor, which was later made into a short-running television series.
Taylor's realistic novel -- despite the Tom-Sawyer-like protagonist and narrator, it is...
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A Death in the Family
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 and released posthumously in 1957 by editor David...
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Andersonville
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 1955 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the...
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A Fable
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 received mixed critical reviews and a reputation as...
The Old Man and the Sea
The Old Man and the Sea is a novella by Ernest Hemingway, written in Cuba in 1951 and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction to be produced by Hemingway and published in his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it centers upon...
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The Caine Mutiny
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 with, among other things, the moral and ethical...
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The Town
The Town is a novel written by Conrad Richter in 1950. It is the third installment of his Awakening Land trilogy, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1951.
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The Way West
The Way West is a western novel by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., published in 1949. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1950. The book became the basis for a film starring Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, and Richard Widmark.
Former senator William...
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Guard of Honor
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 Forces base in central Florida. The action occurs over...
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Tales of the South Pacific
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 observations and anecdotes he collected while stationed as a...
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Angle of Repose
Angle of Repose is a 1972 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Wallace Stegner about a wheelchair-bound historian, Lyman Ward, who has lost connection with his son and living family and decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents. It won the...
