Arrowsmith

Author	Booth Tarkington
ISBN	1434100243

Alice Adams, the daughter of middle-class parents, wants desperately to belong with the people of "high society" who live in her town. Ultimately, her ambitions are tempered by the realities of her situation, which she learns to accept with grace and style. Alice's resiliency of spirit makes her one...

Author	Oliver La Farge
ISBN	0618446729

Capturing the essence of the Southwest in 1915, Oliver La Farge's Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel is an enduring American classic. At a ceremonial dance, the young, earnest silversmith Laughing Boy falls in love with Slim Girl, a beautiful but elusive "American"-educated Navajo. As they experience...

Author	Robert Lewis Taylor
ISBN	0385422229

Dr. Sardius McPheeters, is a dreamer always chasing the elusive beautiful rainbow, but never quite fully grasping it in his hands, the gambler and imbiber of strong drinks, is a capable physician in Louisville, Kentucky, his family suffers though, but his creditors want their money...The time, during...

Author	John P. Marquand
ISBN	0316735671

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...

Author	Edna Ferber
ISBN	1417906774

Winner of the 1924 Pulitzer Prize, So Big is widely regarded as Edna Ferber's crowning achievement. A rollicking panorama of Chicago's high and low life, this stunning novel follows the travails of gambler's daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family, and her...

Author

Margaret Ayer Barnes

This family saga centres on the life of Chicago native Jane Ward and her upper-class family and friends. We meet her as a young teen and watch her transformation from carefree girl to independent Bryn Mawr student to reluctant wife to worrying mother and grandmother. With so many characters involved,...

Author	John Hersey
ISBN	0394756959

3.5 stars rounded up.

It’s 1943 and Victor Joppolo, an American Major, is assigned to oversee the town of Adano in occupied Italy. Joppolo passionately believes in the American system, and through his idealism—which reminded me a little bit of the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—he...

Author	Jean Stafford
ISBN	0374529930

These Pulitzer Prize-winning stories represent the major short works of fiction by one of the most distinctively American stylists of her day.

Jean Stafford communicates the small details of loneliness and connection, the search for freedom and the desire to belong, that not only illuminate...

Author	James Alan McPherson
ISBN	0449213579

A beautiful collection of short stories that explores blacks and whites today, Elbow Room is alive with warmth and humor. Bold and very real, these twelve stories examine a world we all know but find difficult to define.

Whether a story dashes the bravado of young street toughs or pierces through...

Author	Edwin O'Connor
ISBN	0829421238

“A realistic Christian novel of hope in a non-Christian age.”—New England Quarterly

“A deeply felt and eloquently expressed work . . . A quiet, gentle novel of considerable insight and charm . . .”—Library Journal
“O’Connor succeeds in delineating poignantly the...

Author	William Faulkner
ISBN	0394724135

This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1955. 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...

Author	Conrad Richter
ISBN	0821409808

Winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1951


The Awakening Land trilogy traces the transformation of Ohio from wilderness to farmland to the site of modern industrial civilization, all in the lifetime of one character. The trilogy earned Richter immediate acclaim as a historical novelist....

Author	T.S. Stribling
ISBN	1568490569

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1933, The Store is the second novel of Stribling's monumental trilogy set in the author's native Tennessee Valley region of North Alabama. The novel's action begins in 1884, when Grover Cleveland became the first Democratic president since the end of the Civil War, and...

Author	Josephine Winslow Johnson
ISBN	1558610359

Brilliant, evocative, poetic, savage, this Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel (1934) written when Josephine Winslow Johnson was only 24, depicts a white, middle-class urban family that is turned into dirt-poor farmers by the Depression and the great drought of the thirties. The novel moves through...

Author	Ernest Poole
ISBN	1594624089

In this 1918 Pulitzer Prize winning story, widower Roger Gale struggles to deal with the way his children and grandchildren respond to the changing society. His Family is the story of a sixty-year-old New York man who reflects on his life and the lives of his three daughters. The women represent three...

Author	Margaret Wilson
ISBN	0877972885

I'm reading every Pulitzer Prize winning novel, in order, and reached 1924's The Able McLaughlins. With a deep breath, and gritted teeth, I started a book I'd never heard of, that I was sure I wouldn't like. I thought the title was stupid and the plot didn't interest me.
But, as it turned out, I judged...

Author	Julia Peterkin
ISBN	0820323772

Julia Peterkin pioneered in demonstrating the literary potential for serious depictions of the African American experience. Rejecting the prevailing sentimental stereotypes of her times, she portrayed her black characters with sympathy and understanding, endowing them with the full dimensions...

Author	Louis Bromfield
ISBN	1888683317

Bromfield takes a close look at the Pentlands- a fictional rich family in New England- exposing the hypocrisy and ignorance behind their luxurious facade. Bromfield's eloquence when describing both his characters and their surroundings is breathtaking, and his accuracy in describing the characters'...

Author	Martin Flavin
ISBN	0837133378

In a sensitive and full dimensioned portrayal of American life, Martin Flavin has created a memorable character. By turns admirable, pitiable, tough, noble, weak, futile, and brilliantly effective, a lonely man going nowhere in the dark, Sam Braden mirrors thousands like him who have put their familiar...

Author	Ellen Glasgow
ISBN	1568496273

This novel is an analytical study of the feeling of kinship as it is manifested in the Timberlake family, decayed aristocrats living in a southern city. The story of how two marriages are wrecked and a great wrong done to an innocent Negro boy, is told largely as it is viewed by Asa Timberlake, sixty years...

Author

H.L. Davis

Honey in the Horn is a novel about life in the homesteading days of Oregon, 1906-1908. It is about the coming of age of an orphan boy named Clay Calvert, but it is also the about the trials of the pioneers who came to Oregon following the American Dream. Through the characters that Clay meets along the way,...

Author	James Gould Cozzens
ISBN	0679603050

So here we have the 631-page novel that won the Pulitzer in 1949, yet when I went Davis Kidd bookstore in West Nashville to purchase it, I was amazed to discover that not only did Davis Kidd not carry the novel, it had been out of print for years. Initially, I decided that was all I needed to know: no one publishes...

Author	Upton Sinclair
ISBN	1931313032

This novel embraces the period from the Wall Street Crash of 1929 to the Nazi Blood Purge of 1934. Wm. Schuman, Professor of Political Science at Williams College said "There is nothing I have read, in prose or verse, fiction of fact, which has impressed me so vividly with the realities of National Socialism....

Author

Caroline Miller

In 1934, Caroline Miller's novel Lamb in His Bosom won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. It was the first novel by a Georgia author to win a Pulitzer, soon followed by Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind in 1937. In fact, Lamb was largely responsible for the discovery of Gone With the Wind; after reading...