The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It recognizes distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, published during the preceding calendar year.
Lionel Barrymore was an American actor of stage, screen and radio as well as a film director. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in A Free Soul (1931) and is known to modern audiences for the role of villainous Mr. Potter in Frank Capra's 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life.
Ethel Barrymore was an American actress and a member of the Barrymore family of actors. Barrymore was a stage, screen and radio actress whose career spanned six decades, and was regarded as "The First Lady of the American Theatre". She received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, winning for None but the Lonely Heart (1944).
Katherine Anne Porter was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, poet and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. In 1966, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter.
Zoe Byrd Akins was an American playwright, poet, and author. She won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for drama for The Old Maid.
Dorothy Heyward was an American playwright.
The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1929.
The Ethel Barrymore Theatre is a Broadway theater at 243 West 47th Street in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Opened in 1928, it was designed by Herbert J. Krapp in the Elizabethan, Mediterranean, and Adam styles for the Shubert family. The theater, named in honor of actress Ethel Barrymore, has 1,058 seats and is operated by the Shubert Organization. Both the facade and the auditorium interior are New York City landmarks.
Julia Peterkin was an American author from South Carolina. In 1929 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Novel/Literature for her novel Scarlet Sister Mary. She wrote several novels about the plantation South, especially the Gullah people of the Lowcountry. She was one of the few white authors who wrote about the African-American experience.
Caroline Pafford Miller was an American novelist. She gathered the folktales, stories, and archaic dialects of the rural communities she visited in her home state of Georgia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and wove them into her first novel, Lamb in His Bosom, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1934, and the French literary award, the Prix Femina Americain in 1935. Her success as the first Georgian winner of the fiction prize inspired Macmillan Publishers to seek out more southern writers, resulting in the discovery of Margaret Mitchell, whose first novel, Gone with the Wind, also won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Miller's story about the struggles of nineteenth-century south Georgia pioneers found a new readership in 1993 when Lamb in His Bosom was reprinted, one year after her death. In 2007, Miller was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
Doris Marie Rankin was an American stage and film actress.
Olive Tell was a stage and screen actress from New York City.
Daniel A. Reed was an American actor, playwright, and screenwriter.
Look Homeward, Angel is a 1957 stage play by the playwright Ketti Frings. The play is based on Thomas Wolfe's 1929 largely autobiographical novel of the same title.
A. J. Verdelle, is an American novelist who is published by Algonquin Books and Harper, with essays published by Crown, the Smithsonian, the Whitney Museum, Random House, and University of Georgia Press. Verdelle has forthcoming novels from Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau.
Lang Syne Plantation is a historic plantation near St. Matthews, Calhoun County, South Carolina. The plantation was established in the 18th century by Ann Heatly Reid Lovell and her nephew Langdon Cheves, a prominent South Carolina politician and president of the Second Bank of the United States.
Mabel Ridley was an American mezzo-soprano singer who appeared in Broadway theatre and revues in the 1920s and 1930s.
John Rathbone Oliver was an American psychiatrist, medical historian, author, and priest. His novel Victim and Victor was a contender for the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but the award went to Julia Peterkin's Scarlet Sister Mary.
The Underground Railroad is a historical fiction novel by American author Colson Whitehead, published by Doubleday in 2016. The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora, a slave in the Antebellum South during the 19th century, who makes a bid for freedom from her Georgia plantation by following the Underground Railroad, which the novel depicts as a rail transport system with safe houses and secret routes. The book was a critical and commercial success, hitting the bestseller lists and winning several literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. A TV miniseries adaptation, written and directed by Barry Jenkins, was released in May 2021.
Ethel Barrymore Colt was an American actress and producer and a soprano who sang in more than 100 concerts in the United States, Canada, and South America. She was a member of the ninth generation of the Barrymore acting family. Her obituary in The Washington Post described her as "a versatile and talented singer, actress and producer, playing dramatic roles on Broadway and in summer stock and singing in grand opera, operetta, musical comedy and on the concert stage."
