My Favorite Pulitzer Winners (51-75)
Explore top Pulitzer Prize-winning books (51-75) in this curated list of must-read literary masterpieces. Discover award-winning fiction that shaped modern literature.
Book
Advise and Consent
by Allen Drury
Probes the drama and maneuvering surrounding the choice of an American Secretary of State.
Book
Foreign Affairs
by Alison Lurie
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE Virginia Miner, a fifty-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about children’s folk rhymes. Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying and oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist who dresses more Bronco Billy than Beau Brummel. Also in London is Vinnie’s colleague Fred Turner, a handsome, flat broke, newly separated, and thoroughly miserable young man trying to focus on his own research. Instead, he is distracted by a beautiful and unpredictable English actress and the world she belongs to. Both American, both abroad, and both achingly lonely, Vinnie and Fred play out their confused alienation and dizzying romantic liaisons in Alison Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Smartly written, poignant, and witty, Foreign Affairs remains an enduring comic masterpiece. “A splendid comedy, very bright, brilliantly written in a confident and original manner. The best book by one of our finest writers.” –Elizabeth Hardwick “There is no American writer I have read with more constant pleasure and sympathy. . . . Foreign Affairs earns the same shelf as Henry James and Edith Wharton.” –John Fowles “If you manage to read only a few good novels a year, make this one of them.” –USA Today “An ingenious, touching book.” –Newsweek “A flawless jewel.” –Philadelphia Inquirer
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The Late George Apley
by John P. Marquand
A modern classic restored to print -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that charts the diminishing fortunes of a distinguished Boston family in the early years of the 20th century. Sweeping us into the inner sanctum of Boston society, into the Beacon Hill town houses and exclusive private clubs where only the city's wealthiest and most powerful congregate, the novel gives us -- through the story of one family and its patriarch, the recently deceased George Apley -- the portrait of an entire society in transition. Gently satirical and rich with drama, the novel moves from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression as it projects George Apley's world -- and subtly reveals a life in which success and accomplishment mask disappointment and regret, a life of extreme and enviable privilege that is nonetheless an imperfect life.
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Tales of the South Pacific
by James Albert Michener
"Truly one of the most remarkable books to come out of the war. Mr. Michener is a born story-teller." THE NEW YORK TIMES Winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Enter the exotic world of the South Pacific, meet the men and women caught up in the drama of a big war. The young Marine who falls madly in love with a beautiful Tonkinese girl. Nurse Nellie and her French planter, Emile De Becque. The soldiers, sailors, and nurses playing at war and waiting for love in a tropic paradise.
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Book
A Death in the Family
by James Agee
Jay Follet is healthy, robust, and in the prime of life when he sets out from home one hot summer night to tend to his sick father. He leaves behind a wife and two small children, promising to return the next evening if at all possible.
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Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and a baffling new world, the characters in Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.
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The Executioner's Song
by Norman Mailer
Re-creates the crime, trial and events leading to the execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, who requested the death sentence.
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The Town
by Conrad Richter
The story of a pioneer family and the transition they have to make as urban areas begin to spread in the 1800s.
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House Made of Dawn
by N. Scott Momaday
A young American Indian returning from World War II searches for his place on his old reservation and in urban society.
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The Optimist's Daughter
by Eudora Welty
This Pulitzer Prize–winning novel tells the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Along in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.
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Guard of Honor
by James Gould Cozzens
Guard of Honor is a neglected masterpiece that stands comparison with the greatest novels of the Second World War--essayist Noel Perrin deemed it "probably the best war novel of the twentieth century." James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. The novel balances a vast cast of intricately enmeshed characters as they react over the course of three tense days in September 1943 to a racial incident on a U.S. Army airbase in Florida. The reader is acutely aware of the war raging abroad and the effect it has had, or will have, on the multitude of servicemen who populate Cozzens's immense canvas. As Noel Perrin commented in The Washington Post Book World: "There is material for two or three hundred movies in Guard of Honor." "No other American novelist of our time writes with such profound understanding of the wellsprings of human character and of the social pressures that help to form it," said Orville Prescott in The New York Times. As Brendan Gill observed in The New Yorker "Every page of Guard of Honor gives the impression of a writer at the very top of his powers setting out to accomplish nothing less than his masterwork."
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A Fable
by William Faulkner
This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 195. An allegorical story of World War I, set in the trenches in France and dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment, it was originally considered a sharp departure for Faulkner. Recently it has come to be recognized as one of his major works and an essential part of the Faulkner oeuvre. Faulkner himself fought in the war, and his descriptions of it "rise to magnificence," according to The New York Times, and include, in Malcolm Cowley's words, "some of the most powerful scenes he ever conceived."