Thornton Wilder

American playwright and novelist (1897–1975)

Thornton Wilder

Wilder in 1948

Born| Thornton Niven Wilder
(1897-04-17)April 17, 1897
Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.
Died| December 7, 1975(1975-12-07) (aged 78)
Hamden, Connecticut, U.S.
Occupation|

* Playwright
* novelist

Education| Oberlin College
Yale University (BA)
Princeton University (MA)
Notable works|

* The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)
* Our Town (1938)
* The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)

Notable awards|

* Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (1927)
* Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1938, 1943)
* Edward MacDowell Medal (1960)
* National Book Award for Fiction (1968)

Relatives| Thornton M. Niven

Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.

## Early life and education

[edit]

Wilder with two of his siblings and their father Amos at the family cottage in Maple Bluff, Wisconsin in 1900

Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor[1] and later a U.S. diplomat, and Isabella Thornton Niven.[2]

Wilder had four siblings as well as a twin who was stillborn.[3] All of the surviving Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China when their father was stationed in Hong Kong and Shanghai as U.S. Consul General. Thornton's older brother, Amos Niven Wilder, became Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School. He was a noted poet[citation needed] and was instrumental in developing the field of theopoetics. Their sister Isabel Wilder was an accomplished writer. They had two more sisters, Charlotte Wilder, a poet, and Janet Wilder Dakin, a zoologist.[4]

## Education

[edit]

Wilder in his 1920 Yale College graduation photo

Wilder began writing plays while at the Thacher School in Ojai, California, where he did not fit in and was teased by classmates as overly intellectual. According to a classmate, "We left him alone, just left him alone. And he would retire at the library, his hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and indifference."[This quote needs a citation] His family lived for a time in China, where his sister Janet was born in 1910. He attended the English China Inland Mission Chefoo School at Yantai, but returned with his mother and siblings to California in 1912 because of the unstable political conditions in China at the time.[5] Thornton graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915.[6]

Wilder served a three-month enlistment in the U.S. Army's Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Adams in Rhode Island during World War I, eventually rising to the rank of corporal. He attended Oberlin College before earning his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1920 at Yale University, where he refined his writing skills as a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a literary society. He earned his Master of Arts degree in French literature from Princeton University in 1926.[7]

## Career

[edit]

Frank Craven, Martha Scott, and John Craven in the original Broadway production of Our Town, published in 1938, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Wilder as Mr. Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth in 1948 Wilder on the cover of the January 12, 1953 issue of Time magazine

After graduating, Wilder went to Italy and studied archaeology and Italian (1920–21) as part of an eight-month residency at The American Academy in Rome, and then taught French at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, beginning in 1921.[8] His first novel, The Cabala, was published in 1926. In 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey brought him commercial success and his first Pulitzer Prize (1928).[9] He resigned from the Lawrenceville School in 1928. From 1930 to 1937, he taught at the University of Chicago, during which time he published his translation of André Obey's own adaptation of the tale "Le Viol de Lucrece" (1931) under the title "Lucrece" (Longmans Green, 1933).[10] In Chicago, he became famous as a lecturer and was chronicled on the celebrity pages.[11] In 1938, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Our Town, and he won the prize again in 1943 for his play The Skin of Our Teeth.[12]

World War II saw Wilder rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Air Force Intelligence, first in Africa, then in Italy until 1945. He received several awards for his military service.[fn 1] He went on to be a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he served for a year as the Charles Eliot Norton professor. Though he considered himself a teacher first and a writer second, he continued to write all his life, receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1957 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. In 1968 he won the National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.[13][14]

Proficient in four languages,[8] Wilder translated plays by André Obey and Jean-Paul Sartre. He wrote the libretti of two operas, The Long Christmas Dinner, composed by Paul Hindemith, and The Alcestiad, composed by Louise Talma and based on his own play. Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired, asked him to write the screenplay of his thriller Shadow of a Doubt,[15] and he completed a first draft for the film.[8]

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) tells the story of several unrelated people who happen to be on a bridge in Peru when it collapses, killing them. Philosophically, the book explores the question of why unfortunate events occur to people who seem "innocent" or "undeserving". It won the Pulitzer Prize[1] in 1928, and in 1998 it was selected by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century. The book was quoted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the memorial service for victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001.[16] Since then its popularity has grown enormously.[citation needed] The book is the progenitor of the modern disaster epic in literature and film-making, where a single disaster intertwines the victims, whose lives are then explored by means of flashbacks to events before the disaster.[citation needed]

Wilder wrote Our Town, a popular play (and later film) set in fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. It was inspired in part by Dante's Purgatorio[17][18] and in part by his friend Gertrude Stein's novel The Making of Americans.[19] Wilder suffered from writer's block while writing the final act. Our Town employs a choric narrator called the Stage Manager and a minimalist set to underscore the human experience. Wilder himself played the Stage Manager on Broadway for two weeks and later in summer stock productions. Following the daily lives of the Gibbs and Webb families, as well as the other inhabitants of Grover's Corners, the play illustrates the importance of the universality of the simple, yet meaningful lives of all people in the world in order to demonstrate the value of appreciating life. The play won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize.[20]

In 1938, Max Reinhardt directed a Broadway production of The Merchant of Yonkers, which Wilder had adapted from Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842). It was a failure, closing after 39 performances.[21]

His play The Skin of Our Teeth opened in New York on November 18, 1942, featuring Fredric March and Tallulah Bankhead. Again, the themes are familiar – the timeless human condition; history as progressive, cyclical, or entropic; literature, philosophy, and religion as the touchstones of civilization. Three acts dramatize the travails of the Antrobus family, allegorizing the alternate history of mankind. It was claimed by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, authors of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, that much of the play was the result of unacknowledged[dubious - discuss] borrowing from James Joyce's last work.[fn 2][22]

In his novel The Ides of March (1948), Wilder reconstructed the characters and events leading to, and culminating in, the assassination of Julius Caesar. He had met Jean-Paul Sartre on a U.S. lecture tour after the war, and was under the influence of existentialism, although rejecting its atheist implications.[23]

In 1954, Tyrone Guthrie encouraged Wilder to rework The Merchant of Yonkers into The Matchmaker. This time the play opened in 1955 and enjoyed a healthy Broadway run of 486 performances with Ruth Gordon in the title role, winning a Tony Award for Guthrie, its director. It became the basis for the hit 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!, with a book by Michael Stewart and score by Jerry Herman.[24]

In 1960, Wilder was awarded the first ever Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture.[25]

In 1962 and 1963, Wilder lived for 20 months in the small town of Douglas, Arizona, apart from family and friends. There he started his longest novel, The Eighth Day, which went on to win the National Book Award.[14] According to Harold Augenbraum in 2009, it "attack[ed] the big questions head on, ... [embedded] in the story of small-town America".[26]

His last novel, Theophilus North, was published in 1973, and made into the film Mr. North in 1988.[27]

The Library of America republished all of Wilder's plays in 2007, together with some of his writings on the theater and the screenplay of Shadow of a Doubt.[28] In 2009, a second volume was released, containing his first five novels, six early stories, and four essays on fiction.[29] Finally, the third and final volume in the Library of America series on Wilder was released in 2011, containing his last two novels The Eighth Day and Theophilus North, as well as four autobiographical sketches.[30]

## Personal life

[edit]

Six years after Wilder's death, Samuel Steward wrote in his autobiography that he had sexual relations with him.[31] In 1937, Gertrude Stein had given Steward, then a college professor, a letter of introduction to Wilder. According to Steward, Alice B. Toklas told him that Wilder liked him and that Wilder had reported he was having trouble starting the third act of Our Town until he and Steward walked around Zürich all night in the rain and the next day wrote the whole act, opening with a crowd in a rainy cemetery.[32] Penelope Niven disputes Steward's claim of a relationship with Wilder and, based on Wilder's correspondence, says Wilder worked on the third act of Our Town over the course of several months and completed it several months before he first met Steward.[33] Robert Gottlieb, reviewing Penelope Niven's work in The New Yorker in 2013, claimed Wilder had become infatuated with a man, not identified by Gottlieb, and Wilder's feelings were not reciprocated. Gottlieb asserted that "Niven ties herself in knots in her discussion of Wilder's confusing sexuality" and that "His interest in women was unshakably nonsexual." He takes Steward's view that Wilder was a latent homosexual but never comfortable with sex.[34]

Wilder had a wide circle of friends, including writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Toklas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Stein; actress Ruth Gordon; fighter Gene Tunney; and socialite Sibyl, Lady Colefax.[1]

From the earnings of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in 1930 Wilder had a house built for his family in Hamden, Connecticut, designed by Alice Trythall Washburn, one of the few female architects working at the time. His sister Isabel lived there for the rest of her life. This became his home base, although he traveled extensively and lived away for significant periods.

## Death

[edit]

Thorton N Wilder's gravestone, Hamden, Connecticut

Wilder died of heart failure in his Hamden, Connecticut, house on December 7, 1975,[8] at age 78. He is interred at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hamden.[35]

## Works

[edit]

### Plays

[edit]

* The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926)
* The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (1928):[36]
* "Nascuntur Poetae"
* "Proserpina and the Devil"
* "Fanny Otcott"
* "Brother Fire"
* "The Penny That Beauty Spent"
* "The Angel on the Ship"
* "The Message and Jehanne"
* "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
* "Centaurs"
* "Leviathan"
* "And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead"
* "The Servant's Name Was Malchus"
* "Mozart and the Gray Steward"
* "Hast Thou Considered My Servant Job?"
* "The Flight Into Egypt"
* "The Angel That Troubled the Waters"
* The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act (1931):
* The Long Christmas Dinner
* Queens of France
* Pullman Car Hiawatha
* Love and How to Cure It
* Such Things Only Happen in Books
* The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
* Our Town (1938)—won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama[20]
* The Merchant of Yonkers (1938)
* The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)—won the Pulitzer Prize[20]
* The Matchmaker (1954)—revised from The Merchant of Yonkers
* The Alcestiad: Or, a Life in the Sun (1955)
* Childhood (1960)
* Infancy (1960)
* Plays for Bleecker Street (1962)
* The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder Volume I (1997):
* The Long Christmas Dinner
* Queens of France
* Pullman Car Hiawatha
* Love and How to Cure It
* Such Things Only Happen in Books
* The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
* The Drunken Sisters
* Bernice
* The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five
* A Ringing of Doorbells
* In Shakespeare and the Bible
* Someone from Assisi
* Cement Hands
* Infancy
* Childhood
* Youth
* The Rivers Under the Earth
* Our Town

### Novels

[edit]

* The Cabala (1926)
* The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)—won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel[9]
* The Woman of Andros (1930)—based on Andria, a comedy by Terence
* Heaven's My Destination (1935)
* Ides of March (1948)
* The Eighth Day (1967)—won the National Book Award for Fiction[14]
* Theophilus North (1973)—reprinted as Mr. North following the appearance of the film of the same name

### Collections

[edit]

* Wilder, Thornton (2007). McClatchy, J. D. (ed.). Thornton Wilder, Collected Plays and Writings on Theater. Library of America. Vol. 172\. New York: Library of America. ISBN 978-1-59853-003-2.
* Wilder, Thornton (2009). McClatchy, J. D. (ed.). Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels 1926–1948. Library of America. Vol. 194\. New York: Library of America. ISBN 978-1-59853-045-2.
* Wilder, Thornton (2011). McClatchy, J. D. (ed.). Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, Autobiographical Writings. Library of America. Vol. 222\. New York: Library of America. ISBN 978-1-59853-146-6.

### Films

[edit]

* Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - co-written by Wilder with Sally Benson and Alma Reville

## Further reading

[edit]

* Gallagher-Ross, Jacob. 2018. "Theaters of the Everyday". Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0-8101-3666-3.
* Gottlieb, Robert (January 7, 2013). "Man of Letters: The Case of Thornton Wilder". The New Yorker. Vol. 88, no. 42\. pp. 71–76. Retrieved October 24, 2014.
* Kennedy, Harold J. 1978. "No Pickle, No Performance. An Irreverent Theatrical Excursion from Tallulah to Travolta". Doubleday & Co.

## Notes

[edit]

1. ^ The American Legion of Merit and Bronze Star, Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur from France, and an honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) from Britain.
2. ^ Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson published a pair of reviews-cum-denunciations entitled "The Skin of Whose Teeth?" in the Saturday Review immediately after the play's debut; these created a huge uproar at the time. Campbell's Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, Novato, California: New World Library, 2004, pp. 257–266, ISBN 978-1-57731-406-6 reprints the reviews and discusses the controversy.

## References

[edit]

1. ^ a b c Isherwood, Charles (October 31, 2012). "A Life Captured With Luster Left Intact". The New York Times. p. C1. Retrieved November 1, 2012.
2. ^ "Mrs. Wilder Dies in East". Wisconsin State Journal. July 3, 1946. p. 5. Retrieved June 3, 2020 - via Newspapers.com.
3. ^ Man of Letters: The Case of Thornton Wilder By Robert Gottlieb, December 31, 2012 Published in print in the column A Critic at Large in the January 7, 2013, issue of The New Yorker. Accessed online May 4, 2020.
4. ^ Niven, Penelope (2012). Thornton Wilder: A Life. Harper. pp. 92, 370.
5. ^ McArdle, Phil (December 17, 2008). "Thornton Wilder on the South Side of Our Town". The Berkeley Daily Planet.
6. ^ "Biography". Thornton Wilder. Retrieved January 10, 2018.
7. ^ "Chronology". Thornton Wilder Society. Retrieved July 14, 2017.
8. ^ a b c d Margulies, Donald (1998). Our Town – A Play in Three Acts. HarperPerennial. Foreword and "About The Author" by Margulies. ISBN 978-0-06-051263-7.
9. ^ a b ""Novel": Past winners & finalists by category". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved March 28, 2012.
10. ^ Siegel, Barbara; Siegel, Scott (May 22, 2000). "Lucrece". TheaterMania.com.
11. ^ Jones, Chris. "Our town was Wilder's town too". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved February 13, 2020.
12. ^ "Drama – The Pulitzer Prizes". Pulitzer. Columbia University. 2017. Retrieved April 27, 2017.
13. ^ [1] The Wilder Family Website
14. ^ a b c "National Book Awards – 1968". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 28, 2012. (With an essay by Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
15. ^ Kornhaber, Donna (2013). "Hitchcock's Diegetic Imagination: Thornton Wilder, Shadow of a Doubt, and Hitchcock's Mise-en-Scène". Clues: A Journal of Detection. 31 (1): 67–78\. doi:10.3172/CLU.31.1.67.
16. ^ "Text of Tony Blair's reading in New York". The Guardian. London, UK. September 21, 2001. Retrieved June 3, 2009. "A witness to the deaths, wanting to make sense of them and explain the ways of God to his fellow human beings, examined the lives of the people who died, and these words were said by someone who knew the victims, and who had been through the many emotions, and the many stages, of bereavement and loss.

"But soon we will die, and all memories of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love. The only survival, the only meaning."
17. ^ Breyer, Jackson R. editor. Rojcewicz, Stephen. "Our Tears: Lacrimae Rerum and Thorton Wilder". Thornton Wilder in Collaboration: Collected Essays on His Drama and Fiction. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, December 17, 2018. p. 166 ISBN 978-1-5275-2364-7.
18. ^ Erhard, Elise. "Searching for Our Town". Crisis Magazine. February 7, 2013.
19. ^ Konkle, Lincoln. Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition. University of Missouri Press (2006). pp. 7–10. ISBN 978-0-8262-6497-8
20. ^ a b c "Drama". Past winners & finalists by category. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved March 28, 2012.
21. ^ Niven, Penelope (2012). Thornton Wilder: A Life. Harper. p. 471.
22. ^ Campbell, Joseph (2005). Pathways to Bliss. Novato, California: New World Library. pp. 121–123. ISBN 978-1-57731-471-4.
23. ^ Goldstein, Malcolm (1965). The Art of Thornton Wilder. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 19–20. ISBN 978-0-80320-057-9.
24. ^ "Hello Dolly! – New Wimbledon Theatre (Review)". indielondon.co.uk. March 2008.
25. ^ "Macdowell Medalists". Retrieved August 22, 2022.
26. ^ Augenbraum, Harold (July 23, 2009). "1968: The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder". National Book Foundation. Archived from the original on March 20, 2012. Retrieved March 28, 2012.
27. ^ Longsdorf, Amy (November 17, 1988). "With 'Mr. North,' Danny Huston Gets His Bearings As A Director". The Morning Call.
28. ^ Wilder, Thornton (2007). McClatchy, J. D. (ed.). Collected Plays and Writings on Theater. New York: Library of America. ISBN 978-1-59853-003-2.
29. ^ Wilder, Thornton (2009). The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels 1926–1948. Library of America. ISBN 978-1-59853-045-2.
30. ^ Wilder, Thornton (2011). McClatchy, J. D. (ed.). The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Library of America. ISBN 978-1-59853-146-6.
31. ^ Mulderig, Jeremy, ed. (2018). The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward: Recollections of an Extraordinary Twentieth-Century Gay Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 118–124.
32. ^ Steward, Samuel M. (1977). "The Memoir". In Steward, Samuel M. (ed.). Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas. Houghton Mifflin. pp. 26, 32. ISBN 0-395-25340-3.
33. ^ Niven, Penelope (2012). Thornton Wilder: A Life. HarperCollins. pp. 433–437\. ISBN 978-0-06083-136-3.
34. ^ Gottlieb, Robert (January 7, 2013). "Man of Letters". The New Yorker. Retrieved June 17, 2017.
35. ^ Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons (3rd ed.). McFarland & Company, Inc. (Kindle Location 50886).
36. ^ "Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays and Writings on Theater". Library of America. Retrieved July 14, 2017.

## External links

[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Thornton Wilder.

English Wikisource has original works by or about:

Thornton Niven Wilder

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Thornton Wilder.

* Official website
* Works by Thornton Wilder in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
* Works by Thornton Wilder at Project Gutenberg
* Works by or about Thornton Wilder at the Internet Archive
* Works by Thornton Wilder at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
* The Thornton Wilder Society
* Richard H. Goldstone (Winter 1956). "Thornton Wilder, The Art of Fiction No. 16". The Paris Review. Winter 1956 (15).
* "Thornton Wilder". Find a Grave. Retrieved May 28, 2009.
* Thornton Wilder at the Internet Broadway Database Retrieved on May 18, 2009
* Thornton Wilder at the Internet Off-Broadway Database (archived)
* Thornton Wilder Collection at the Harry Ransom Center
* Biography from The Thornton Wilder Society
* Today in History, The Library of Congress, April 17
* Thornton Wilder Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
* Thornton Wilder Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
* Finding aid to Thornton Wilder letters at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
* Guide to the Thornton Wilder Papers 1939–1968 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center

Non-profit organization positions

Preceded by

François Mauriac

|  Wartime International Presidential Committee 1941–47 PEN International
1941–1947  | Succeeded by

Hu Shih

* v
* t
* e

Thornton Wilder

Plays|

* The Long Christmas Dinner (1931)
* The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden (1931)
* Our Town (1938)
* The Merchant of Yonkers (1938)
* The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)
* The Matchmaker (1954)

Books|

* The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)
* The Woman of Andros (1930)
* The Ides of March (1948)
* The Eighth Day (1967)
* Theophilus North (1973)

Adaptations|

* The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929 film)
* Our Town (1940 film)
* The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944 film)
* Our Town (1955 TV)
* The Matchmaker (1958 film)
* The Happy Journey (1963)
* Hello, Dolly! (1964 musical)
* Hello, Dolly! (1969 film)
* Our Town (2003 film)
* The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004 film)
* Our Town (2006 opera)
* OT: Our Town (documentary)

Family|

* Amos Wilder (brother)
* Charlotte Wilder (sister)
* Janet Wilder Dakin (sister)

* v
* t
* e

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Authors

* Jesse Lynch Williams (1918)
* Eugene O'Neill (1920)
* Zona Gale (1921)
* Eugene O'Neill (1922)
* Owen Davis (1923)
* Hatcher Hughes (1924)
* Sidney Howard (1925)
* George Kelly (1926)
* Paul Green (1927)
* Eugene O'Neill (1928)
* Elmer Rice (1929)
* Marc Connelly (1930)
* Susan Glaspell (1931)
* George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin (1932)
* Maxwell Anderson (1933)
* Sidney Kingsley (1934)
* Zoe Akins (1935)
* Robert E. Sherwood (1936)
* Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman (1937)
* Thornton Wilder (1938)
* Robert E. Sherwood (1939)
* William Saroyan (1940)
* Robert E. Sherwood (1941)
* Thornton Wilder (1943)
* Mary Chase (1945)
* Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay (1946)
* Tennessee Williams (1948)
* Arthur Miller (1949)
* Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan (1950)
* Joseph Kramm (1952)
* William Inge (1953)
* John Patrick (1954)
* Tennessee Williams (1955)
* Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich (1956)
* Eugene O'Neill (1957)
* Ketti Frings (1958)
* Archibald MacLeish (1959)
* Jerome Weidman, George Abbott, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (1960)
* Tad Mosel (1961)
* Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows (1962)
* Frank D. Gilroy (1965)
* Edward Albee (1967)
* Howard Sackler (1969)
* Charles Gordone (1970)
* Paul Zindel (1971)
* Jason Miller (1973)
* Edward Albee (1975)
* Michael Bennett, Nicholas Dante, James Kirkwood Jr., Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban (1976)
* Michael Cristofer (1977)
* D. L. Coburn (1978)
* Sam Shepard (1979)
* Lanford Wilson (1980)
* Beth Henley (1981)
* Charles Fuller (1982)
* Marsha Norman (1983)
* David Mamet (1984)
* James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim (1985)
* August Wilson (1987)
* Alfred Uhry (1988)
* Wendy Wasserstein (1989)
* August Wilson (1990)
* Neil Simon (1991)
* Robert Schenkkan (1992)
* Tony Kushner (1993)
* Edward Albee (1994)
* Horton Foote (1995)
* Jonathan Larson (1996)
* Paula Vogel (1998)
* Margaret Edson (1999)
* Donald Margulies (2000)
* David Auburn (2001)
* Suzan-Lori Parks (2002)
* Nilo Cruz (2003)
* Doug Wright (2004)
* John Patrick Shanley (2005)
* David Lindsay-Abaire (2007)
* Tracy Letts (2008)
* Lynn Nottage (2009)
* Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey (2010)
* Bruce Norris (2011)
* Quiara Alegría Hudes (2012)
* Ayad Akhtar (2013)
* Annie Baker (2014)
* Stephen Adly Guirgis (2015)
* Lin-Manuel Miranda (2016)
* Lynn Nottage (2017)
* Martyna Majok (2018)
* Jackie Sibblies Drury (2019)
* Michael R. Jackson (2020)
* Katori Hall (2021)
* James Ijames (2022)
* Sanaz Toossi (2023)
* Eboni Booth (2024)
* Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (2025)

* v
* t
* e

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Previously the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel from 1917–1947

1918–1925|

* His Family by Ernest Poole (1918)
* The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (1919)
* The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1921)
* Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington (1922)
* One of Ours by Willa Cather (1923)
* The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson (1924)
* So Big by Edna Ferber (1925)

1926–1950|

* Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (1926; declined)
* Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield (1927)
* The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1928)
* Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin (1929)
* Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge (1930)
* Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes (1931)
* The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1932)
* The Store by Thomas Sigismund Stribling (1933)
* Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Pafford Miller (1934)
* Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson (1935)
* Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis (1936)
* Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1937)
* The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand (1938)
* The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1939)
* The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1940)
* In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow (1942)
* Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair (1943)
* Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin (1944)
* A Bell for Adano by John Hersey (1945)
* All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1947)
* Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener (1948)
* Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens (1949)
* The Way West by A. B. Guthrie Jr. (1950)

1951–1975|

* The Town by Conrad Richter (1951)
* The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (1952)
* The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1953)
* A Fable by William Faulkner (1955)
* Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (1956)
* A Death in the Family by James Agee (1958)
* The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor (1959)
* Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (1960)
* To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1961)
* The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor (1962)
* The Reivers by William Faulkner (1963)
* The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau (1965)
* The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
* The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (1967)
* The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (1968)
* House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1969)
* The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford (1970)
* Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (1972)
* The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty (1973)
* No award given (1974)
* The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (1975)

1976–2000|

* Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow (1976)
* No award given (1977)
* Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson (1978)
* The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1979)
* The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (1980)
* A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1981)
* Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike (1982)
* The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983)
* Ironweed by William Kennedy (1984)
* Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie (1985)
* Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1986)
* A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (1987)
* Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988)
* Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1989)
* The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos (1990)
* Rabbit at Rest by John Updike (1991)
* A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (1992)
* A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler (1993)
* The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (1994)
* The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1995)
* Independence Day by Richard Ford (1996)
* Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser (1997)
* American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1998)
* The Hours by Michael Cunningham (1999)
* Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)

2001–present|

* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2001)
* Empire Falls by Richard Russo (2002)
* Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2003)
* The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2004)
* Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2005)
* March by Geraldine Brooks (2006)
* The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007)
* The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2008)
* Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009)
* Tinkers by Paul Harding (2010)
* A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011)
* No award given (2012)
* The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson (2013)
* The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2014)
* All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2015)
* The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016)
* The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2017)
* Less by Andrew Sean Greer (2018)
* The Overstory by Richard Powers (2019)
* The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (2020)
* The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (2021)
* The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen (2022)
* Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver / Trust by Hernan Diaz (2023)
* Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips (2024)
* James by Percival Everett (2025)

* v
* t
* e

National Book Award for Fiction

1950–1975|

* The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren (1950)
* Collected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner (1951)
* From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1952)
* Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1953)
* The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1954)
* A Fable by William Faulkner (1955)
* Ten North Frederick by John O'Hara (1956)
* The Field of Vision by Wright Morris (1957)
* The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever (1958)
* The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud (1959)
* Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth (1960)
* The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter (1961)
* The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1962)
* Morte d'Urban by J. F. Powers (1963)
* The Centaur by John Updike (1964)
* Herzog by Saul Bellow (1965)
* The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
* The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (1967)
* The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder (1968)
* Steps by Jerzy Kosiński (1969)
* them by Joyce Carol Oates (1970)
* Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow (1971)
* The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (1972)
* Chimera by John Barth (1973)
* Augustus by John Williams (1973)
* Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1974)
* A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1974)
* Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone (1975)
* The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams (1975)

1976–2000|

* J R by William Gaddis (1976)
* The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner (1977)
* Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle (1978)
* Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien (1979)
* Sophie's Choice by William Styron (1980)
* The World According to Garp by John Irving (1980)
* Plains Song: For Female Voices by Wright Morris (1981)
* The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1981)
* Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike (1982)
* So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (1982)
* The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983)
* The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty (1983)
* Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist (1984)
* White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985)
* World's Fair by E. L. Doctorow (1986)
* Paco's Story by Larry Heinemann (1987)
* Paris Trout by Pete Dexter (1988)
* Spartina by John Casey (1989)
* Middle Passage by Charles Johnson (1990)
* Mating by Norman Rush (1991)
* All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (1992)
* The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (1993)
* A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis (1994)
* Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth (1995)
* Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett (1996)
* Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (1997)
* Charming Billy by Alice McDermott (1998)
* Waiting by Ha Jin (1999)
* In America by Susan Sontag (2000)

2001–present|

* The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)
* Three Junes by Julia Glass (2002)
* The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard (2003)
* The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck (2004)
* Europe Central by William T. Vollmann (2005)
* The Echo Maker by Richard Powers (2006)
* Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (2007)
* Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (2008)
* Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (2009)
* Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (2010)
* Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011)
* The Round House by Louise Erdrich (2012)
* The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (2013)
* Redeployment by Phil Klay (2014)
* Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson (2015)
* The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016)
* Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017)
* The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (2018)
* Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (2019)
* Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (2020)
* Hell of a Book by Jason Mott (2021)
* The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty (2022)
* Blackouts by Justin Torres (2023)

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