Foyles Bookshop

UK National Bookseller of the Year 2013 & 2012! Celebrating 110 years, est 1903. A UK registered company. Visit us instore & online. Foyles

Home Contact Us My Login Index Careers Help

Create a Login Receive our Newsletter

Free Delivery available in the UK over £10

Your Basket ()

Search:

Within:

Refine by:

Help with Search » Advanced Search »

Enter your search into one or more of the boxes below:
Title of the book contains:
Author's name contains:
ISBN:
All fields:
	PhraseAll wordsAny words

You can refine your search by selecting from any of the options below:
Price range:
Publication year:
Product Type:
Include Marketplace:
Category:
Availability:
Sort by:

Browse Menu:

Clear

The Pulitzer Prizes

Pulizer Prize

The Pulitzer Prizes were set up by Columbia University in 1917 to reward excellence in journalism and the arts, initially funded by $2m left in the will of publisher Joseph Pulitzer specifically for such a purpose.

There are twenty-one prizes awarded each April, each of which comes with a prize of $10,000. Six of them are directly relevant to the book world: those for Fiction (originally Novel), Drama, Poetry, Biography & Autobiography, History and General Non-Fiction.

The prizes are held in high esteem around the world, with the Fiction Award as significant as the Nobel Prize for Literature in terms of the British reading public's interest. Recipients are chosen by an independent Board, who have also made the nominated finalists - essentially, the shortlists - public since 1980. They choose from entrants selected by a series of Committees.

There have been a number of multiple winners. Robert Frost won four times in the Biography category, while Nobel Laureate Eugene O'Neill matched this achievement in the Drama category. Thornton Wilder won in Drama twice and Fiction once, Robert Penn Warren won Poetry twice and Fiction once and Carl Sandburg also won Poetry twice as well as Biography once. William Faulkner, John Updike and Booth Tarkington all won twice in the Fiction category. Ten Pulitzer winners went on to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, including Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow and John Steinbeck.

The circumstances of 1981's Fiction winner are perhaps the most remarkable. John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces had been rejected by a number of editors shortly before the author's suicide in 1969. But his mother remained convinced of the quality of the manuscript and, enlisting the support of novelist Walter Percy (who was to write a foreword for the first edition), she finally saw it in print in 1980. Initially a cult classic, the award of the Pulitzer cemented its place in the canon of Southern literature as a picaresque masterpiece.

The biggest literary controversy occurred in 1974, when the Fiction Committee unanimously recommended Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow for the Prize, but the Board decided to make no award. Pynchon had already refused to accept the National Book Award for his novel.

In 1941, Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls had also received unanimous endorsement, but the board were persuaded by the President of Columbia University, who deemed the book offensive, not to make an award.

In 2012, three finalists were chosen but the judges were unable to reach a majority decision and so no winner was selected. It has been suggested that the judges were perplexed by the unconventional nature of what they had to choose from: in addtional to Karen Russell's debut novel Swamplandia!, they considered David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, which was completed by his editor after his death, and Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, originally published as a novella in 2002 but reissued as new in 2011.