The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is America’s premier award for novels and short story collections. While the Booker has the greater prestige of being an international prize, the Pulitzer is the highest literary honour for American fiction. The list of winners is a decent guide to canonical US writing of the past century, albeit with notable oversights – The Great Gatsby, for example.
To coincide with the announcement of this year’s winner, here are 13 of the best.
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
Writing at the dawn of the modern era in the early 20th century, Wharton looks back 40 years to 1870s New York, where Newland Archer’s engagement to beautiful but bland May Welland is jeopardised when he meets captivating Countess Olenska. Wharton captures a world on the brink of change at the same time as drawing the reader into the drama of the love triangle in this ironically titled classic that shows there never was an innocent age.
William Collins, £3.99
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
The story of Tom Joad and his family of evicted tenant farmers, Steinbeck’s novel of America’s Great Depression-era Dust Bowl never loses its power or relevance. The Joads set out for California, meeting people who are suffering similar hardship or worse, and encounter more stark realities when they get there. In a famous speech, Tom says: “Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.” A realist masterpiece and political rallying point.
Penguin £8.99
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)
The Nobel Laureate’s novella is an enthralling paean to mankind’s relationship to nature and striving for fulfillment, delivered in pellucid prose. More prosaically, it’s about ageing fisherman Santiago’s struggle to land an enormous marlin. A career high-point for one of America’s greatest writers, it is a solid entry-point to his work.
Penguin, £7.99
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
Perhaps the most beloved Pulitzer fiction winner, as has it been popular with young readers stirred by its examination of racism and injustice in 1930s Alabama. Six-year-old Scout Finch is the narrator; her father Atticus is the book’s hero for his integrity and courage in defending a Black man who’s accused of rape, despite angering his white neighbours.
Arrow, £8.99
Collected Stories by John Cheever (1978)
John Cheever is one of the masters of short fiction in any language. His tales of gin-soaked suburbia in New York and Connecticut distil the quiet desperation that lies beyond the manicured lawns and inspired the TV series Mad Men. Several of his best, such as “The Five-Forty-Eight”, “The Country Husband” and “The Swimmer” can be discovered and re-read in this inexhaustible collection of a life’s work.
Vintage Classics, £14.99
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy-Toole (1981)
A posthumous comic picaresque by an unknown academic who killed himself aged 31 may be the most unlikely Pulitzer winner ever. It may also be the funniest, so rambunctiously unforgettable is its protagonist Ignatius J Reilly, who despairs at the vulgarity of modern life in New Orleans. Every character – Ignatius’s long-suffering mother, his love interest Myrna Minkoff, the beleaguered policeman Mancuso and others from the memorable cast – is drawn with minimum fuss and maximum effect, while the Louisianan dialogue pops.
Penguin, £10.99
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison’s novel of two intertwined stories – one about a family of formerly enslaved people in the decade following the American Civil War, the other about the woman who haunts them – is one of the most important novels of the past half-century. Challenging, troubling and ultimately rewarding in its treatment of the psychological and political legacies of racism, its victory was a watershed for African American writers, who had previously been under-recognised by this prize.
Vintage, £9.99
Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1989)
Every reader has their favourite Anne Tyler, and one wonders how The Accidental Tourist didn’t win in 1985, but this is right up there. She explores dreams, disappointment and consolation in the marriage of well-meaning but meddlesome Maggie and taciturn Ira Moran, who are driving to a funeral. The things they say are so relatable, their characteristics so recognisable, that the novel’s emotional heft creeps up on you.
Vintage Edition, £9.99
American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1998)
Philip Roth’s sole Pulitzer winner, the first part of his landmark American Trilogy, stands apart for its mix of sly humour and incendiary passages that expose the dark heart of the American dream. It concerns Swede Levov, a Jewish glove manufacturer, whose family was torn asunder when his daughter Merry bombed a post office in protest at the war in Vietnam and went on the run in the US terrorist underground of the 1960s.
Vintage Classics, £9.99
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2005)
Twenty-five years after her debut Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returned with the story of John Ames, an elderly pastor who is writing an account of his life for his young son. Set in the 1950s, the novel reaches back to the late 19th century, when Ames was born, and explores American history, religious faith and mortality. Robinson sustains and modulates Ames’s voice brilliantly, conveying the force of his beliefs and his decline.
Virago, £10.99
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011)
The Pulitzer categorised this display of high-wire ventriloquism as a collection of stories but it is really a novel of multiple narrators whose accounts overlap in NYC. From record exec Bennie to kleptomaniac Sasha and her autistic son Lincoln, who is obsessed with pauses in rock songs, each character is luminously alive in this meditation on time and technology. Never mind the chapter that’s presented in PowerPoint – Jennifer Egan is a powerhouse.
Corsair, £10.99
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2017)
Colson Whitehead creates alternative history by reimagining the Underground Railroad – a 19th-century network of hidden routes and safe houses for enslaved people trying to escape to the abolitionist northern states – as a literal railway. Enslaved Cora’s bid for freedom, which she narrates along with others, such as her mother and a slave-catcher, mixes genres to ignite the tension between America’s past and present.
Fleet, £10.99
James by Percival Everett (2025)
Percival Everett takes on an American classic of the 19th century by putting the eponymous James – an enslaved minor character named Jim in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn – at the centre of this extraordinary historical novel. The reader inhabits every scene, as the sun beats down on the Mississippi River, and the characters’ voices resonate when you read their dialogue. Everett’s prose dazzles as he gives James his language and agency with profound and moving results.
Picador, £9.99