Pulitzer Prizes for Letters
1917-2000

(Fiction, Drama, Poetry, Biography, History)

Fiction
Drama
Poetry
Biography
Links in red are to individuals, not works
History
Links in red are to individuals, not works
1917 No Award No Award No Award Laura E. Richards
Maude H. Elliot
Florence H. Hall
Julia Ward Howe
J. J. Jusserand
With Americans of Past and Present Days
1918 Ernest Poole
His Family
Jesse L. Williams
Why Marry?
Sara Teasdale
Love Songs
William C. Bruce
Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed
James F. Rhodes
A History of The Civil War
1919 Booth Tarkington
The Magnificent Ambersons
No Award Margaret Widdemer
Old Road to Paradise
Carl Sandburg
Cornhuskers
Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams
No Award
1920 No Award Eugene O'Neill
Beyond the Horizon
No Award Albert J. Beveridge
The Life of John Marshall
Justin H. Smith
The War with Mexico
1921 Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence
Zona Gale
Miss Lulu Bett
No Award Edward Bok
The Americanization of Edward Bok
William S. Sims
Burton J. Hendrick
The Victory at Sea
1922 Booth Tarkington
Alice Adams
Eugene O'Neill
Anna Christie
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Collected Poems
Hamlin Garland
A Daughter of the Middle Border
James Truslow Adams
The Founding of New England
1923 Willa Cather
One of Ours
Owen Davis
Icebound
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver; A Few Figs from Thistles; Eight Sonnets
Burton J. Hendrick
Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page
Charles Warren
The Supreme Court in United States History
1924 Margaret Wilson
The Able McLaughlins
Hatcher Hughes
Hell-Bent for Heaven
Robert Frost
New Hampshire
Michael Pupin
From Immigrant to Inventor
[Autobiography]
Charles H. McIlwain
The American Revolution, A Constitutional Interpretation
1925 Edna Ferber
So Big
Sidney Howard
They Knew What They Wanted
Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Man Who Died Twice
M. A. DeW. Howe
Barrett Wendell and His Letters
Frederic L. Paxon
A History of the American Frontier, 1763-1893
1926 Sinclair Lewis
Arrowsmith
(Award declined)
George Kelly
Craig's Wife
Amy Lowell
What's O'Clock?
Harvey Cushing
Life of Sir William Osler
Edward Channing
The War for Southern Independence
1927 Louis Bromfield
Early Autumn
Paul Green
In Abraham's Bosom
Leonora Speyer
Fiddler's Farewell
Emory Holloway
Whitman; An Interpretation in Narrative
Samuel F. Bemis
Pickney's Treaty: A Study of America's Advantage from Europe's Distress
1928 Thornton Wilder
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Eugene O'Neill
Strange Interlude
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Tristram
C. E. Russell
The American Orchestra adn Theodore Thomas
Vernon L. Parrington
Main Currents in American Thought (Vols. 1 and 2)
1929 Julia Peterkin
Scarlet Sister Mary
Elmer Rice
Street Scene
Stephen Vincent Benet
John Brown's Body
Burton J. Hendrick
The Training of an American: The Earlier Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page
Fred Albert Shannon
Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861-1865
1930 Oliver LaFarge
Laughing Boy
Marc Connelly
The Green Pastures
Conrad Aiken
Selected Poems
Marquis James
The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston
Claude H. Van Tyne
The War of Independence
1931 Margaret Ayer Barnes
Years of Grace
Susan Glaspell
Alison's House
Robert Frost
Collected Poems
Henry James
Charles W. Eliot
Bernadotte E. Schnitt
The Coming of the War: 1914
1932 Pearl Buck
The Good Earth
George Kaufman
Morrie Ryskind
Of Thee I Sing
George Dillon
The Flowering Stone
Henry Pringle
Thoedore Roosevelt
John J. Pershing
My Experiences in the World War
1933 T. S. Stribling
The Store
Maxwell Anderson
Both Your Houses
Archibald MacLeish
Conquistador
Allan Nevins
Grover Cleveland
Frederick J. Turner
The Significance of Sections in American History
1934 Caroline Miller
Lamb in His Bosom
Sidney Kingsley
Men in White
Robert Hillyer
Collected Verse
Tyler Dennett
John Hay
Herbert Agar
The People's Choice
1935 Josephine Johnson
Now in November
Zoe Akins
The Old Maid
Audrey Wurdemann
Bright Ambush
Douglas Freeman
R. E. Lee
Charles McL. Andrews
The Colonial Period of American History
(Vol. 1)
1936 H. L. Davis
Honey in the Horn
Robert Sherwood
Idiot's Delight
Robert Coffin
Strange Holiness
Ralph B. Perry
The Thought and Character of William James
Andrew C. McLaughlin
Constitutional History of the United States
1937 Margeret Mitchell
Gone With the Wind
George Kaufman
Moss Hart
Ira Gershwin
You Can't Take It With You
Robert Frost
A Further Range
Allan Nevins
Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Great Administration
Van Wyck Brooks
The Flowering of New England
1938 J. P. Marquand
The Late George Apley
Thornton Wilder
Our Town
Marya Zaturenska
Cold Morning Sky
Odell Shepard
Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott
Marquis James
Andrew Jackson
Paul H. Buck
Road to Reunion
1939 Marjorie K. Rawlings
The Yearling
Robert Sherwood
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
John Gould Fletcher
Selected Poems
Carl Van Doren
Benjamin Franklin
Frank L. Mott
A History of American Magazines
1940 John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
William Saroyan
The Time of Your Life (Award declined)
Mark Van Doren
Collected Poems
Ray Stannard Baker
Woodrow Wilson
(Vols. 7 and 8)
Carl Sandburg
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
1941 No Award Robert Sherwood
There Shall Be No Night
Leonard Bacon
Sunderland Capture
Ola Elizabeth Winslow
Jonathan Edwards
Marcus Lee Hansen
The Atlantic Migration
1942 Ellen Galsgow
In This Our Life
No Award William Rose Benet
The Dust Which Is God
Forrest Wilson
Crusader in Crinoline (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
Margaret Leech
Reveille in Washington
1943 Upton Sinclair
Dragon's Teeth
Thornton Wilder
The Skin of Our Teeth
Robert Frost
A Witness Tree
Samuel Eliot Morison
Christopher Columbus: Admiral of the Ocean Sea
Esther Forbes
Paul Revere and the World He Lived In
1944 Martin Flavin
Journey in the Dark
No Award
Special award to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for Oklahoma!
Stephen Vincent Benet
Western Star
Carleton Mabee
The American Leonardo: The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse
Merle Curti
The Growth of American Thought
1945 John Hersey
A Bell for Adano
Mary Chase
Harvey
Karl Shapiro
V-Letter And Other Poems
Russel B. Nye
George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel
Stephen Bonsal
Unfinished Business
1946 No Award Russel Crouse
Howard Lindsay
State of the Union
No Award Linnie Marsh Wolfe
Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Nuir
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The Age of Jackson
1947 Robert Penn Warren
All the King's Men
No Award Robert Lowell
Lord Weary's Castle
William Allen White
Autobiography
James Phinney Baxter
Scientists Against Time
1948 James A. Michener
Tales of the South Pacific
Tennessee Williams
A Streetcar Named Desire
W. H. Auden
The Age of Anxiety
Margaret Clapp
Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow
Bernard De Voto
Across the Wide Missouri
1949 James Gould Cozzens
Guard of Honor
Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman
Peter Viereck
Terror and Decorum
Robert E. Sherwood
Roosevelt and Hopkins
Roy f. Nichols
The Disruption of American Democracy
1950 A. B. Guthrie
The Way West
Richard Rodgers
Oscar Hammerstein II
Joshua Logan
South Pacific
Gwendolyn Brooks
Annie Adams
Samuel Glagg Bemis
John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy
O. W. Larkin
Art and Life in America
1951 Conrad Richter
The Town
No Award Carl Sandburg
Complete Poems
Margaret Louise Coit
John C. Calhoun: American Portrait
R. Carlyle Buley
The Old Northwest, Pioneer Period, 1815-1840
1952 Herman Wouk
The Caine Mutiny
Joseph Kramm
The Shrike
Marianne Moore
Collected Poems
Merlo J. Pusey
Charles Evans Hughes
Oscar Handlin
The Uprooted
1953 Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea
William Inge
Picnic
Archibald MacLeish
Collected Poems 1917-1952
David J. Mays
Edmund Pendleton, 1721-1803
George Dangerfield
The Era of Good Feelings
1954 No Award John Patrick
The Teahouse of the August Moon
Theodore Roethke
The Waking
Charles A. Lindbergh
The Spirit of St. Louis
[Autobiography]
Bruce Catton
A Stillness at Appomattox
1955 William Faulkner
A Fable
Tennessee Williams
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Wallace Stevens
Collected Poems
William S. White
The Taft Story
Paul Horgan
Great River, The Rio Grande in North American History
1956 MacKinlay Kantor
Andersonville
Albert Hackett
Frances Goodrich
The Diary of Anne Frank
Elizabeth Bishop
Poems--North & South
Talbot Faulkner Hamlin
Benjamin Henry Latrobe
Richrad Hofstadter
Age of Reform
1957 No Award Eugene O'Neill
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Richard Wilbur
Things of This World
John F. Kennedy
Profiles in Courage
George F. Kennan
Russia Leaves the War
1958 James Agee
A Death in the Family
Ketti Frings
Look Homeward, Angel
Robert Penn Warren
Promises: Poems 1954-1956
Douglas S. Freeman
George Washington
(Vol. 5 and 6)
John A. Carroll
Mary W. Ashworth
George Washington
(Vol. 7)
Bray Hammond
Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War
1959 Robert Lewis Taylor
The Travels of Jamie McPheeters
Archibald MacLeish
J. B.
Stanley Kunitz
Selected Poems
Arthur Walworth
Woodrow Wilson (2 vols.)
Leonard D. White
The Republican Era: 1869-1901
1960 Allen Drury
Advise and Consent
Jerome Weidman
George Abbott
Fiorello!
W. D. Snodgrass
Heart's Needle
Samuel Eliot Morison
John Paul Jones
Margaret Leech
In the Days of McKinley
Special award to Garrett Mattingly for The Armada
1961 Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tad Mosel
All the Way Home
Phyllis McGinley
Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades
David Donald
Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War
Herbert Feis
Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference
Special award to the American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War
1962 Edwin O'Connor
The Edge of Sadness
Frank Loesser
Abe Burrows
How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying
Alan Dogan
Poems
No Award Lawrence Gipson
The Truimphant Empire: Thunder Clouds Gather in the West
1963 William Faulkner
The Reivers
No Award William Carlos Williams
Pictures from Brueghel
Leon Edel
Henry James
(Vol. 2 and 3)
Constance M. Green
Washington, Village and Capital
1964 No Award No Award Louis Simpson
At the End of the Open Road
Walter Jackson Bate
John Keats
Sumner Chilton Powell
Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town
1965 Shirley Ann Grau
The Keepers of the House
Frank D.Gilroy
The Subject Was Roses
John Berryman
77 Dream Songs
Ernest Samuels
Henry Adams (3 vols.)
Irwin Unger
The Greenback Era
1966 Katherine Anne Porter
Collected Stories
No Award Richard Eberhart
Selected Poems
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
A Thousand Days
Perry Miller
The Life and the Mind in America
1967 Bernard Malamud
The Fixer
Edward Albee
A Delicate Balance
Anne Sexton
Live or Die
Justin Kaplan
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain
William H. Goetzmann
Exploration and Empire
1968 William Styron
The Confessions of Nat Turner
No Award Anthony Hecht
The Hard Hours
George Frost Kennan
Memoirs
Bernard Bailyn
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
1969 Scott Momaday
House Made of Dawn
Howard O. Sackler
The Great White Hope
George Oppen
Of Being Numerous
Benjamin L. Reid
The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends
Leonard W. Levy
Origins of the Fifth Amendment: The Right Against Self-Incrimination
1970 Jean Stafford
The Collected Stories
Charles Gordone
No Place to Be Somebody
Richard Howard
Untitled Subjects: Poems
T. Harry Williams
Huey Long
Dean Acheson
Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department
1971 No Award Paul Zindel
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-
Moon Marigolds
W. S. Merwin
The Carrier of Ladders
Lawrance R. Thompson
Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938
James M. Burns
Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom
1972 Wallace Stegner
Angle of Repose
No Award James A. Wright
Collected Poems
Joseph P. Lash
Eleanor and Franklin: the Story of Their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers
Carl N. Degler
Niether Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States
1973 Eudora Welty
The Optimist's Daughter
Jason Miller
That Championship Season
Maxine Kumin
Up Country: Poems of New England
W. A. Swanberg
Luce and His Empire
Michael G.Kammen
People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization
1974 No Award No Award Robert Lowell
The Dolphin
Louis Shaeffer
O'Neill: Son and Artist
Daniel J. Boorstin
The Americans: The Democratic Experience
1975 Michael Shaara
The Killer Angels
Edward Albee
Seascape
Gary Snyder
Turtle Island
Robert A. Caro
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Dumas Malone
Jefferson and His Time
1976 Saul Bellow
Humboldt's Gift
James Kirkwood
Nicholas Dante
Edward Kleban
Michael Bennett
A Chorus Line
John Ashbery
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Richard W. Lewis
Edith Wharton: A Biography
Paul Horgan
Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times
1977 No Award Michael Cristofer
The Shadow Box
James Merrill
Divine Comedies
John E. Mack
A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence
David M. Potter
The Impending Crisis, 1848-1961
(Completed and Edited by Don E. Fehrenbacker)
1978 James A. McPherson
Elbow Room: Stories
D. L. Coburn
The Gin Game
Howard Nemerov
The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov
Walter J. Bate
Samuel Johnson
Alfred D. Chandler
The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
1979 John Cheever
The Stories of John Cheever
Sam Shepard
Buried Child
Robert Penn Warren
Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978
Leonard Baker
Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baech and the Berlin Jews
Don E. Fehrenbacher
The Dred Scott Case, Its Significance in American Law and Politics
1980 Norman Mailer
The Executioner's Song
Lanford Wilson
Talley's Folly
Donald Justice
Selected Poems
Edmund Morris
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Leon F. Litwack
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
1981 John K. Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces
Beth Henley
Crimes of the Heart
James Schuyler
The Morning of the Poem
Robert K. Massie
Peter the Great, His Life and World
Lawrence A. Cremin
American Education, The National Experience: 1783-1876
1982 John Updike
Rabbit is Rich
Charles Fuller
A Soldier's Play
Sylvia Plath
The Collected Poems
William S. McFeely
Grant: A Biography
Mary B. M. Chesnut
Mary Chesnut's Civil War (Edited by C. Vann Woodward)
1983 Alice Walker
The Color Purple
Marsha Norman
'Night Mother
Galway Kinnell
Selected Poems
Russell Baker
Growing Up
[Autobiography]
Rhys Isaac
The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790
1984 William Kennedy
Ironweed
David Mamet
Glengarry Glen Ross
Mary Oliver
American Primitive
Louis R. Harlan
Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915
No Award
1985 Alison Lurie
Foreign Affairs
Stephen Sondheim
James Lapine
Sunday in the Park With George
Carloyn Kizer
Yin New Poems
Kenneth Silverman
The Life and Times of Cotton Mather
Thomas K. McCraw
Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn
1986 Larry McMurtry
Lonesome Dove
No Award Henry Taylor
The Flying Change
Elizabeth Frank
Louise Bogan : A Portrait
Walter A. McDougall
The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age
1987 Peter Taylor
A Summons to Memphis
August Wilson
Fences
Rita Dove
Thomas & Beulah
David Garrow
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Bernard Bailyn
Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
1988 Toni Morrison
Beloved
Alfred Uhry
Driving Miss Daisy
William Meredith
Partial Accounts: New & Selected Poems
David J. Donald
Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe
Robert V. Bruce
The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876
1989 Anne Tyler
Breathing Lessons
Wendy Wasserstein
The Heidi Chronicles
Richard Wilbur
New & Collected Poems
Richard Ellmann
Oscar Wilde
James M. McPherson
Battle Cry of freedom: The Civil War Era
Taylor Branch
Parting the Waters: American in the King Years, 1954-63
1990 Oscar Hijuelos
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
August Wilson
The Piano Lesson
Charles Simic
The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems
Sebastian De Grazia
Machiavelli in Hell
Stanley Karnow
In Our Image
1991 John Updike
Rabbit At Rest
Neil Simon
Lost in Yonkers
Mona Van Duyn
Near Changes: Poems
Steven W. Naifeh
Jackson Pollock: An American Genius
Laurel Ulrich
A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812
1992 Jane Smiley
A Thousand Acres
Robert Schenkkan
The Kentucky Cycle
James Tate
Selected Poems
Lewis B. Puller
Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller, Jr.,
Mark E. Neely
The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties
1993 Robert Butler
A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain
Tony Kushner
Angels in America
Louise Gluck
The Wild Iris
David G. McCullough
Truman
Gordon S. Wood
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
1994 Annie Proulx
The Shipping News
Edward Albee
Three Tall Women
Yusef Komunyakaa
Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems
David L. Lewis
DuBois--Biography of a Race, 1868-1919
No Award
1995 Carol Shields
The Stone Diaries
Horton Foote
The Young Man From Atlanta
Philip Levine
The Simple Truth: Poems
Joan D. Hedrick
Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
Doris Kearns Goodwin
No Ordinary Line: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
1996 Richard Ford
Independence Day
Johnathan Larson
Rent
Jorie Graham
The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994
Jack Miles
God: A Biography
Alan Taylor
William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic
1997 Steven Millhauser
Martin Dressler: The Tale of An American Dreamer
No Award Lisel Mueller
Alive Together: New and Selected Poems
Frank McCourt
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
[Autobiography]
Jack N. Rakove
Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
1998 Philip Roth
American Pastoral
Paula Vogel
How I Learned to Drive
Charles Wright
Black Zodiac
Katharine Graham
Personal History
Edward J. Larson
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and American's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
1999 Michael Cummingham
The Hours
Margaret Edson
Wit
Mark Strand
Blizzard of One
A. Scott Berg
Lindberg
Edwin G. Burrows
Mike Wallace
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
2000 Jhumpa Lahiri
Interpreter of Maladies
Donald Margulies
Dinner With Friends
C. K. Williams
Repair
Stacy Schiff
Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
David Kennedy
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-45