Ranking the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners.

Today, the Pulitzer Prize Board will announce the winners of the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes, including that for Fiction, which – assuming they give one out this year – will give us the 91st honoree in this category (which was known as the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel until 1948) in the 101 years since the awards began. The Board declined to give this award to any title in 1920, 1941, 1946, 1954, 1957, 1964, 1971, 1977, and most recently in 2012.

I have read all 90 winners to date – thank you, thank you, hold your applause till the end, please – and have now presumed to rank them, because ranking is a thing I do. As the list goes on, the writeups get shorter, because you really don’t need to read them all, or even half of them, and even the bad ones at the end aren’t so-bad-they’re-good, just bad, and I chose instead to spend my words up top on the good ones. I’ll update this post each year when we get a new winner and I’ve had a chance to read it.

Linked book titles go to amazon; links to my reviews, all on this site, are separate and come after the author’s name. If there’s no link to a review, I didn’t write one.

1. Beloved – Toni Morrison. (1988) Beloved has a strong case for the greatest American novel ever written; a 2006 New York Times poll of authors, critics, and editors, asking them to name the best novel of the last 25 years, and Morrison’s magnum opus won. It is a searing story of a runaway slave woman who sees the toddler she killed (to save her from a life in bondage) reappear as a ghost, calling herself Beloved, wreaking havoc among their poor black community. Rich in metaphor and symbol, Beloved is the most acclaimed novel by any African-American author, and the greatest novel we have to describe our country’s greatest shame and its still-extant ramifications.

2. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee. (1961) Call it a children’s novel if you like – as if that’s some sort of putdown – or claim that Lee had to have had a little help to craft it, To Kill a Mockingbird is a little slice of prose perfection, capturing the dialect of a specific time and place to tell us the story of a great injustice as seen through one little girl’s eyes.

3. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole. (1981) Perhaps as famous for how it ended up getting published – after the author’s suicide, his mother harassed Walker Percy to read the manuscript, and a skeptical Percy was blown away – as it is for its content, this modern picaresque gave the world Ignatius J. Reilly and his uncooperative pyloric valve, an actual large adult son who is a walking case of arrested development and whose comic misadventures have made him a favorite since the book’s publication. This is one of two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction awarded posthumously.

4. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton. (1921) A subtly witty sendup of the changing American aristocracy and the serious novels describing it that were popular for the preceding century, The Age of Innocence made Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer, and remains one of the great works of irony in American letters.

5. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck. (1940) My review. The final scene is the one most readers remember, but Steinbeck was a masterful writer, showing incredible empathy towards his characters even as he puts them through the wringer.

6. Empire Falls – Richard Russo. (2002) My (brief) review. Russo’s peak output, led by this novel, combines strong characterization – although after a while you notice he has certain archetypes to which he regularly returns – with brilliant, wry humor even over serious plots. This one is probably his most serious, set in a declining mill town where tragedy is just around the corner, populated by a cast of eccentrics.

7. The Road – Cormac McCarthy. (2007) Don’t do what I did, listening to this in audiobook form while doing some long, dark drives to and from Cape Cod League games. It is dark, grim, misanthropic, and also one of the best fictional depictions of the lengths to which a parent will go for his child I have ever seen.

8. The Reivers – William Faulkner. (1963) Okay, it’s Discount Faulkner, but you still get Yoknapatawpha County, and even simplified Faulkner prose is award-worthy. I can only assume that this was, in some part, a lifetime achievement award, as it turned out to be Faulkner’s final novel, but this modern picaresque of the Mississippi underclass is a much more satisfying read than more famous works like As I Lay Dying.

9. All the Light We Cannot See – Doerr, Anthony. (2015) My review. Three intertwined stories, where the main characters don’t meet until the final few pages, built around the tiniest of connections, all packing an enormous emotional wallop.

10. The Color Purple – Alice Walker. (1983) Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with this brutal novel of poor black Southerners in the early 1900s, with particular attention on the plight of black women, doubly disadvantaged in society at that time.

11. The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer. (1980) My review. This is one of the most controversial winners in the award’s history because it’s almost certainly not fiction – it’s a non-fiction novel, but the content is driven by Mailer’s interviews of the subjects of the book, including Gary Gilmore, the first man to be put to death after the restoration of capital punishment in 1976. It’s also the longest winner by page count, over 1000 pages, but is so well-written and compelling that I flew through it.

12. The Orphan Master’s Son – Johnson, Adam. (2013) My review. The Pulitzer Prize criteria for this award are: “For distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” That’s true of most winners, but not this one, a breathtaking work of fiction set in North Korea, as un-American a place as you could find. The story is gripping, the main character extremely well-developed, and the prose moves you through the very dark material so that you’ll still hang on every word.

13. The Stories of John Cheever – John Cheever. (1979) My review. A massive collection of more than fifty stories, this book runs the gamut of Cheever’s career and hits on all of the major themes found in his writing, including conflicted sexuality, the ruinous effects of alcohol, and the vacuous nature of suburban middle-class life.

14. The Caine Mutiny – Herman Wouk. (1952) I loved this book, but never reviewed it because I finished it while trying not to end up in the hospital with a respiratory infection that required a fluoroquinolone, an antibiotic of last resort. Anyway, this book, based on Caine’s own experiences at sea in World War II, tells of a coup d’etat aboard a destroyer when the captain, Lt. Commander Queeg, appears to be unfit to lead, followed by a climactic court-martial of the soldiers involved.

15. All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren. (1947) My review. Loosely based on the rise of Louisiana politician Huey Long, All the King’s Men tells the story of Willie Stark, an ambitious populist who runs for governor of a southern state, and the reporter, Jack Burden, who is embedded in Stark’s campaign and covers his tenure in the state house.

16. A Bell for Adano – John Hersey. (1945) My review. Hersey is best remembered today for Hiroshima, a short book originally printed in the New Yorker as the issue’s sole content, telling the stories of six survivors of the American attack on the Japanese city. A Bell for Adano also covers World War II, but in a serio-comic fashion, as an American officer tries to secure a new church bell for the Italian town of Adano after the fascist regime appropriated their old one to melt it down.

17. Elbow Room – James Alan McPherson. (1978) A short story collection by an African-American essayist who just died in 2016 without much notice, Elbow Room deserves a much wider audience than it has today, telling stories of the black experience that examine and question contemporary notions of race.

18. Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri. (2000) My review. Lahiri has published two short story collections and two novels, with her strength clearly in the shorter form; this debut collection focuses on the dual identities and conflicts faced by Indian emigrants to America and their children, as Lahiri herself was born to Bengali parents in London and grew up in the United States from age two.

19. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz. (2008) My review. One of the most widely acclaimed novels of this century, Oscar Wao incorporates magical realism, Dominican politics and folk traditions, and inventive, acrobatic language that bridges English, Spanish, and whatever came out of Diaz’s own head. The title character is something of a Latino Ignatius P. Reilly, less maddening and a bit more pathetic, which is the main thing keeping this out of the top ten.

20. The Keepers of the House – Shirley Ann Grau. (1965) My review. This novel’s takes on race, from its condemnation of old South racism to its equal treatment of white and black characters, are so strident I was sure the author had to be African-American, but Grau, who will turn 89 this year, is white, born and raised in New Orleans. It’s an angry novel, and with good reason.

21. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson. (2005) My review. I still think Housekeeping, her debut novel, is her best work, but this book, which kicked off a trilogy of stories about one family in a small Iowa town, also showcases Robinson’s beautiful writing and deeply empathetic characterizations, written as a journal from Reverend John Ames to his young son.

22. The Magnificent Ambersons – Booth Tarkington. (1919) The Ambersons become less magnificent as the novel progresses, tracing the decline of the wealthy, aristocratic Indianapolis family, usurped by industrialists who earned their riches. Orson Welles adapted it for his acclaimed 1942 film.

23. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon. (2001) My review. Too long by 150 pages, K&C still brings the boundless imagination of Chabon’s Hugo-winning novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in a complex plot that involves comic books, professional magicians, the Nazis, and the problems faced by Jewish emigrants and closeted gays in mid-20th century America.

24. The Late George Apley – John Phillips Marquand. (1938) My review. Marquand created the detective character Mr. Moto, who appeared in six novels and numerous stories and films, but this was a more serious work, a devious satire of Boston’s upper class and the suffocating nature of privilege and the need to keep up appearances.

25. The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead. (2017) My review. The most recent winner was an obvious choice, an imaginative alternate history where the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad, built underground, that ferried escaping slaves out of the deep south, but often brought them into equally difficult circumstances as they fled north.

26. Lonesome Dove – Larry McMurtry. (1986) My review. The sweeping western epic that launched a critically acclaimed TV mini-series and is now part of a quartet of books that run 2600 pages, its wide scope contrasts with the very simple story at its heart of a friendship between two very different men. I am still mad that Gus had to leave his sourdough biscuit starter behind, though.

27. Foreign Affairs – Alison Lurie. (1985) My review. Lurie’s short novel of two Americans abroad in London embarking on different, unexpected love affairs is a beautiful study of a pair of characters and a meditation on loneliness even in the busiest of locales.

28. Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell. (1937) My review. Yep, it’s pretty racist, and that’s hard to overlook from today’s vantage point. The story itself is a sweeping epic of the ante- and postbellum American South, and Mitchell created two of literature’s most memorable characters in Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.

29. Journey in the Dark – Martin Flavin. (1944) Mostly out of print at this point, Journey gives us Sam Braden, an ambitious young man in 1880s Iowa who wants material and social success but finds they don’t fulfill him when he achieves everything he sought.

30. The Hours – Michael Cunningham. (1999) My one-paragraph review. Combining three related narratives that share ideas but neither time nor place, The Hours builds on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway literally and thematically, even improving it by making it more accessible without undermining her emphasis on the beauty of quotidian details.

31. The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder. (1928) Wilder won three Pulitzers, two for Drama and one for the Novel for this book, in which a Peruvian friar attempts to learn all he can about five victims of a bridge collapse in 1714 so he can find evidence of divine providence in the catastrophe.

32. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway. (1953) An old fisherman heads out to sea. He hasn’t caught a fish in months. He and a boy talk about Joe DiMaggio. The man catches a fish. Some sharks eat it. Life is pointless. Subordinate clauses are for the weak.

33. The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters – Robert Lewis Taylor. (1959) A darker picaresque that alternates humorous and graphic elements, Taylor’s book, which later became an ABC television series, follows the title character on a wagon train headed from Missouri to California in the wake of the gold rush, along with his dissolute doctor father, a journey which brings them disaster, fortunes, and many very bad decisions.

34. The Killer Angels – Michael Shaara. (1975) My review. Shaara might be familiar to the baseball fans among you for his book For the Love of the Game, published posthumously and later adapted into a sappy movie. The Killer Angels is a historical novel of the battle of Gettysburg that hews closely to actual events and has earned praise for its accurate depiction of war.

35. Arrowsmith – Sinclair Lewis. (1926) A debatable entry, as Lewis declined the prize, but unlike later controversies like Gravity’s Rainbow (recommended by the committee, rejected by the board), the Board actually did sign off on this title winning in its year. The book tells the story of a young, idealistic doctor, Martin Arrowsmith, who faces a real-world ethical dilemma during a breakout of bubonic plague when he has an untested, unproven treatment available to him. I thought the setup was strong, but Lewis couldn’t figure out how to stick the landing. Also, I keep hearing Dr. Dre saying, “And no, this ain’t Arrowsmith.”

36. The Sympathizer – Nguyen, Viet Thanh. (2016) My review. Nguyen, a professor of English and American Studies at USC, won with this debut novel narrated by a Vietnamese double agent who has returned to Vietnam and been captured as an enemy of the very state he helped to win the war against the United States.

37. Tales of the South Pacific – James A. Michener. (1948) My review A short story novel, where they’re all tightly connected but each has a self-contained narrative, this winner was later adapted into the hit Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific. It’s a very ‘inside baseball’ look at American sailors in World War II, interacting with natives on various islands that had no actual stake in the war, and preparing for an amphibious invasion of an unnamed island.

38. Early Autumn – Louis Bromfield. (1927) Bromfield’s depiction of a decaying wealthy Protestant family in Massachusetts takes square aim at the hypocrisy of old-world values, incorporating Shakespearean romantic tragedy but suffering somewhat from the dated nature of the plot.

39. Ironweed – William Kennedy. (1984) My review. The final book in Kennedy’s Albany trilogy gives us Francis Phelan, a broken-down alcoholic ex-ballplayer trying to make amends with estranged son Billy, the protagonist of the preceding book in the series.

40. A Summons to Memphis – Peter Taylor. (1987) My review. The summons of the title brings Phillip Carver back to Memphis to see his father, now 81, remarry a younger woman, much to the consternation of his spinster sisters, reopening old wounds from childhood in a plot that borrows slightly from King Lear.

41. American Pastoral – Philip Roth. (1998) My review. Probably higher on most others’ rankings, but I can’t get past Swede, the main character, leaving his daughter in that flophouse once he has finally found her. The development of his character grinds to a halt at that point and it swamped the positives that came before.

42. The Way West – A. B. Guthrie, Jr.. (1950) My review. If the video game Oregon Trail were a book, this would be it.

43. The Yearling – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. (1939) The only young adult novel to win the Pulitzer, The Yearling is the story of a boy and the fawn he takes in as a pet, only to find that he can’t tame the wild creature.

44. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides. (2003) My review. Although the protagonist, an intersex person named Cal, is memorable, the tangled narrative here never quite came together for me, and there’s a weirdly moral aspect as if the genetic mutation is some sort of divine punishment for the act that sets the novel in motion.

45. The Fixer – Bernard Malamud. (1967) My review. The novel that gave us the quote “There’s no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew.” This is a fictionalized version of the story of a Jewish man falsely accused of killing a 13-year-old boy and then imprisoned for two years before he was given a trial.

46. The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt. (2014) My review. One of the most criticized winners since I started paying attention to this stuff for its pop-fiction leanings, The Goldfinch is actually quite well-plotted and doesn’t talk down to its readers, although Tartt, like Sinclair Lewis, can’t quite figure out how to wrap up the book.

47. The Known World – Edward P. Jones. (2004) My review. A novel of slavery, and of slave stories, none more gripping than the true tale of Henry “Box” Brown, the slave who mailed himself to abolitionists in Philadelphia. And the known world loves it when you don’t get down…

48. The Confessions of Nat Turner – William Styron. (1968) My review. Although this novel frequently appears on “greatest books” lists, including TIME‘s list of the 100 greatest novels since the magazine began publication, the cultural appropriation here is itself offensive, as is the portrayal of some white slaveowners as kind and black men as the violent rapists that white Southerners long made them out to be.

49. A Death in the Family – James Agee. (1958) My review. The other posthumous winner of this award, Agee died of a heart attack at 45, leaving a wife and three children (plus another by a previous marriage). This autobiographical novel fictionalizes the death of Agee’s own father in a car accident when he was just five years old. I loathed it when I read it, but I do understand it more today now that I’m older.

50. So Big! – Edna Ferber. (1925) My review. A somewhat dated novel of the battle between materialist and artistic values, the book draws its title from the sing-song line parents and grandparents say to infants.

51. Dragon’s Teeth – Upton Sinclair. (1943) My review. One of Sinclair’s Lanny Budd novels, Dragon’s Teeth is the closest thing to an adventure story among the winners, with Budd heading into the hornet’s nest of Nazi Germany to try to save a Jewish friend who has been sent to a concentration camp.

52. The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck. (1932) The first Pulitzer winner I ever read, back in seventh grade, which likely colors my view of the novel today; I do remember understanding protagonist Wang Lung’s single-minded ambition, but not his betrayal of his faithful wife.

53. Andersonville – MacKinlay Kantor. (1956) My review.A dense historical novel retelling the horrors of the Confederate prison camp in Georgia by this name; it’s an arduous read, but for what it is, and what Kantor wanted to say, it’s well done.

54. March – Geraldine Brooks. (2006) My review. I’ve never been a huge fan of continuation works or parallel novels, even when the source material is something I enjoyed. March is the story of the father in Little Women, absent for much of that work while serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. The story is marred by the introduction of an absurd romance between the title character and a slave he meets.

55. The Optimist’s Daughter – Eudora Welty. (1973) My review. A short novel about a woman who goes home to care for her dying father, who had surgery for a detached retina, and encounters both his unpleasant second wife and her own memories of childhood.

56. Alice Adams – Booth Tarkington. (1922) Alice may have been more of a feminist hero at the time of the novel’s publication, but the novel, still boosted by Tarkington’s prose, hasn’t aged well at all.

57. A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan. (2011) My review. The best example on this list of a good book ruined by a bad ending, as the final chapter-story here is just embarrassing to read (in a “hello, fellow kids!” way).

58. Independence Day – Richard Ford. (1996) I didn’t like The Sportswriter, to which this is a sequel; at least here, Bascombe has grown up and recognized his agency in his own life.

59. Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner. (1972) If you wanted to know all about the mining business in the Old West, well, this is the novel for you.

60. Olive Kitteridge – Elizabeth Strout. (2009) My review. The book behind the HBO miniseries, this one fell flat for me because the title character is kind of a shrew.

61. The Edge of Sadness – Edwin O’Connor. (1962) My review. A dark but not hopeless novel about a Catholic priest who is also a recovering alcoholic as he tries to put his career back together with a return to his hometown.

62. His Family – Ernest Poole. (1918) Three books on this list borrowed (or at least appeared to) structural elements from King Lear; here the crotchety family patriarch can’t get his three adult daughters to listen to him, but they do largely reconcile before his death.

63. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain – Robert Olen Butler. (1993) My review. A collection of short stories written from the perspective of Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, written by a white American who served three years there and fell in love with Vietnamese culture.

64. Advise and Consent – Allen Drury. (1960) My review. It’s so cute to think about the Senate actually considering the merits of any nominee put before it for confirmation. What lovely days those must have been.

65. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer – Steven Millhauser. (1997) My one-paragraph review. A hackneyed story of an ambitious young American entrepreneur who keeps aiming for the next big thing and finds the goal illusory.

66. House Made of Dawn – N. Scott Momaday. (1969) My review. More notable for the fact that Momaday was the first Native American to win the prize than for the book itself.

67. Honey in the Horn – Harold L. Davis. (1936) A seriocomic novel of pioneer life in Oregon around the turn of the 20th century; its humorous elements have not aged well.

68. A Thousand Acres – Jane Smiley. (1992) My review. A direct adaptation of King Lear into modern-day Iowa, told from the perspective of Ginny (Goneril), with an added layer of hidden sexual abuse and twisted family hatred.

69. Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow. (1976) I’ve never understood the critical acclaim for Bellow’s novels, having now read four of them and liked just one, Henderson the Rain King. This bloated book, built out of a short story, criticizes the commercial world’s encroachment on the fine arts, but it feels like it won because Bellow was a three-time bridesmaid by the time of its nomination.

70. Breathing Lessons – Anne Tyler. (1989) The story of the cracks that have grown in a long-term marriage, packaged in the sort of novel you might find in an airport bookstore.

71. One of Ours – Willa Cather. (1923) Not Cather’s best, or second best, but her top two books were both published before the awards existed.

72. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter – Katherine Anne Porter. (1966) Porter had a commercial success in her novel Ship of Fools, but won the Pulitzer for this collection of relatively long stories, many focused on the American South, which also won the National Book Award.

73. In This Our Life – Ellen Glasgow. (1942) My review. Depressing as hell.

74. Laughing Boy – Oliver La Farge. (1930) A Navajo boy falls in love with another Native American girl, but her education in white schools aimed at assimilation complicates their relationship.

75. Tinkers – Paul Harding. (2010) My review. Never judge a book by its cover, as the packaging for Tinkers is far more appealing than the dull book within.

76. The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields. (1995) A long, meandering fictional autobiography of a woman in search of her purpose in life, which is marred from the start by the death of her mother while giving birth.

77. Scarlet Sister Mary – Julia Peterkin. (1929) My review. Peterkin made a valiant effort here to tell the story of a poor black woman unrepentant about her desire to live life on her own terms, but the dialect she uses is painful to read now, and the depiction of the title character is stilted.

78. Lamb in His Bosom – Caroline Miller. (1934) An overly earnest historical novel of the antebellum South.

79. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford – Jean Stafford. (1970) The Guardian called the tone of her writing “lugubrious,” as if that were some sort of compliment.

80. The Able McLaughlins – Margaret Wilson. (1924) My review. A moralizing novel that seems to blame a rape victim for the assault, and suffers from a staccato unfurling of the plot as well.

81. Years of Grace – Margaret Ayer Barnes. (1931) My review. A decent idea that never really goes anywhere, possibly because it was published at a time when more freedom for women was inconceivable.

82. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love – Oscar Hijuelos. (1990) I read this ages ago, and remember being distinctly turned off by how women were depicted in the novel and treated by the characters within it.

83. Now in November – Josephine Winslow Johnson. (1935) This is the story of a poor farming family slowly starving to death. Hard pass.

84. The Town – Conrad Richter. (1951) Boring. Granted, it’s part of a trilogy, and I didn’t read the rest, but I doubt the other two parts were action-packed.

85. The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx. (1994) This also won the National Book Award, but I found it crass and aimless.

86. Rabbit Is Rich – John Updike. (1982) My review. Rabbit was an asshole.

87. Rabbit At Rest – John Updike. (1991) My review. And he certainly didn’t deserve four books or two Pulitzers.

88. A Fable – William Faulkner. (1955) My review. I love me some Faulkner, but let’s call this what it is – a failed experiment. Faulkner wanted to write his Ulysses, but this book is just as impenetrable without the humor or insight of Joyce.

89. The Store – Thomas Sigismund Stribling. (1933) My review. It’s not a terrible book, but it’s terribly racist, even when Stribling may have thought he was being fair.

90. Guard of Honor – James Gould Cozzens. (1949) An absolutely dreadful read in every respect – prose, plot, and character – and one that does a disservice to the members of the armed forces you might expect it to honor. Despite receiving praise in its day, it has sunk without a trace beneath a cavalcade of superior novels of World War II.