Reading Pulitzer Prize Novels

by Deb Baker/Hannah Reed

The Pulitzer prizes were announced this week, and fiction didn’t have a winner! Apparently, the board couldn’t reach a majority. This is the first time a winner hasn't been named since 1977 when A River Runs Through It failed to take home the prize.

This year, I started thinking about how many of the fiction winners I’ve actually read, and discovered that I’ve been serious slacking in the 2000s. But why? When I go through past winners I’ve read, I loved every single one of them. In fact, To Kill a Mockingbird is my favorite story of all time!


Here are my 16 – those I’ve read and the year each won:
2007  The Road by Cormac McCarthy
1999 The Hours by Michael Cunningham
1995 The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
1994 Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
1992 A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
1989 Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
1988 Beloved by Toni Morrison
1986 Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1981 A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
1980 The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
1975 The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
1961 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1953 Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1952 The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
1948 Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener

If you Click here, you can check all the past fiction winners, but be sure to come back and tell us how many are on your read list.

Thanks to Amazon's book descriptions (I love using the site to preview books) and 554 reviews for this particular one (no, I didn't read them all), I think I'll start playing catch-up with Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout.

Happy reading!