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Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
The Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction has been awarded since 1962 for a distinguished book of non-fiction by an American author that is not eligible for consideration in any other category.
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The Making of the President, 1960
The Making of the President, 1960, written by Theodore White and published by Atheneum Publishers in 1961, analyzes the 1960 election in which John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States. The book won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for...
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The Guns of August
The Guns of August, originally published as August 1914 (1962), is a military history book written by Barbara Tuchman. It primarily describes the events of the first month of World War I. The focus of The Guns of August is to provide the history of...
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Anti-intellectualism in American Life
Anti-intellectualism in American Life is a 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Richard Hofstadter.
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O Strange New World
O Strange New World: American Culture-The Formative Years was written by Howard Mumford Jones and published by Viking Press in 1964; it won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
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Wandering Through Winter
Wandering Through Winter: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey Through the North American Winter is a non-fiction book written by Edwin Way Teale, published in 1965 by Dodd, Mead and Company, and winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for...
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The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture written by David Brion Davis and published by Cornell University Press in 1966 won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1967. It was republished in 1988 by Oxford University Press
The Story of Civilization
The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant is an eleven-volume set of books. It was written over a lifetime, and it totals two million words across nearly 10,000 pages. The series is incomplete: in the first book of the series (Our Oriental...
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Armies of the Night
The Armies of the Night (1968) is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning nonfiction novel written by Norman Mailer and sub-titled History as a Novel/The Novel as History. Mailer essentially creates his own genre for the narrative, split...
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So Human an Animal
So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events, is a book written by René Dubos and published by Scribner in 1968. It won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
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Gandhi's Truth
Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence, written by Erik H. Erikson and published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1969, it won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 1970 National Book Award for Philosophy and Religion....
The Rising Sun
The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945, written by John Toland, was published by Random House in 1970 and won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It was republished by Random in 2003.
A chronicle of the...
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Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, written by Frances FitzGerald and published by both Back Bay Publishing and Little, Brown and Company in 1972, in 1973 won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction., the National Book...
Children of Crisis
Children of Crisis is an award winning series of 5 volumes by child psychiatrist and author Robert Coles published by Little, Brown and Company between 1967 and 1977; a social study of children in the United States.
A Study in Courage and Fear,...
The Denial of Death
The Denial of Death is a work of psychology and philosophy written by Ernest Becker and published in 1973. It was awarded the Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction in 1974, two months after the author's death. The book builds largely on the works...
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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a 1974 nonfiction narrative book by Annie Dillard. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975.
The book is about Dillard's experiences at Tinker Creek, which is located in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. In the book, Dillard...
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Why Survive? Being Old In America
Why Survive? Being Old In America written by Robert Neil Butler and published by Harper & Row in 1975, it won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
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Beautiful Swimmers
Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay (1976) is a Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction book by William W. Warner about the Chesapeake Bay, blue crabs and watermen.
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The Dragons of Eden
The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence is a Pulitzer prize winning 1977 book by Carl Sagan. In it, he combines the fields of anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and computer science to give a well...
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On Human Nature
On Human Nature is a 1979 Pulitzer prize-winning book by the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson. The book tries to explain how different characteristics of humans and society can be explained from the point of evolution. He explains how evolution has...
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Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, described by the author as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll".
On its surface, GEB examines...
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, written by American cultural historian Carl E. Schorske and published by Knopf in 1980, won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It has been described as a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the...
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The Soul of a New Machine
Tracy Kidder's non-fiction book, The Soul of a New Machine, chronicles the experiences of an engineering team racing to design a next generation computer under a blistering schedule and tremendous pressure. Published in 1981, it won a Pulitzer Prize...
Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
Is There No Place On Earth For Me? written by Susan Sheehan and published in 1982 by Houghton Mifflin, it won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. This book recounts the lonely, harrowing life of Sylvia Frumkin who is diagnosed...
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The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry
The Social Transformation of American Medicine is a book written by Paul Starr and published by Basic Books in 1982. It won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction as well as the Bancroft Prize.
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The Good War
"The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two (1984) is a telling of the oral history of World War II written by Studs Terkel. The work won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It is a firsthand account of people involved before,...
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Common Ground
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families is a book by J. Anthony Lukas examining race relations in Boston, Massachusetts through the prism of desegregation busing. It received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non...
Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White
Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, written by Joseph Lelyveld and published by Times Books in 1985, won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction as well as the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest.
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a book written by Richard Rhodes, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. The 900-page book is a narrative of the history of the people and...
Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land
Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, written by David K. Shipler and published by Times Books in 1986, won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
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A Bright Shining Lie
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988) is a book by Neil Sheehan, a former New York Times reporter who covered the Vietnam War. It is about U.S. Army retired Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States...
And Their Children After Them
And Their Children After Them (ISBN 9780394577661), written by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson and published by Pantheon Books in 1989, won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It is about sharecropper families during the Great...
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The Ants
The Ants is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, written in 1990, by E. O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler. It was a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1991.
This book is primarily aimed at academics as a reference work, detailing the...
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The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power is Daniel Yergin's 800-page history of the global oil industry from the 1850s through 1990. The Prize benefited from extraordinary timing: published in October 1990, two months after the invasion...
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Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America written by Garry Wills and published by Simon & Schuster in 1992, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
The book uses...
Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire is a bestselling work by David Remnick. Often cited as an example of New Journalism, it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1994.
The book is equal parts history and eyewitness account,...
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The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (ISBN 0-679-40003-6) is a 1994 nonfiction book about evolutionary biology, written by Jonathan Weiner. It won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The finches of the title are the...
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The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism
The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism written by Tina Rosenberg and published by Random House in 1995, won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 1995 National Book Award
Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
Ashes To Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, The Public Health, And The Unabashed Triumph Of Philip Morris, written by Richard Kluger and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1996, won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
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Guns, Germs, and Steel
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1998 it won a Pulitzer Prize and the Aventis Prize for Best Science...
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Annals of the Former World
Annals of the Former World is a book on geology written by John McPhee and published in 1998 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
The book presents a geological history of North America, and was...
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Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II is a history book written by John W. Dower and published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1999. The book covers the Occupation of Japan by the Allies between August 1945 and April 1952, delving into...
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (2000, ISBN 9780060193140) is a book by Herbert P. Bix on Emperor Hirohito, emperor of Japan from December 25, 1926 until his death on January 7, 1989, won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction,
Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, written by Diane McWhorter and published by Simon & Schuster in 2001, won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
"A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide
"A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide is a book by Samantha Power, Professor of Human Rights Practice at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, which explores America's understanding of, response to, and inaction on...
Gulag: A History
Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a non-fiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004...
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Ghost Wars
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, written by Steve Coll, published in 2004 by Penguin Press, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
The book describes...
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Imperial Reckoning
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya written by Caroline Elkins, published by Henry Holt, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
Elkins' work was criticized by historian Lawrence James in The Sunday Times...
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The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 is a historical look at the way in which Al-Qaeda came into being, the background for various terrorist attacks and how they were investigated, and the events that led to the 9/11-2001 terrorist...
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II is a book by Douglas A. Blackmon.
