John Richard Hersey was an American writer and journalist. He is considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reportage. In 1999, Hiroshima, Hersey's account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, was adjudged the finest work of American journalism of the 20th century by a 36-member panel associated with New York University's journalism department.
Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Arrowsmith is a novel by American author Sinclair Lewis, first published in 1925. It won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize. Lewis was greatly assisted in its preparation by science writer Paul de Kruif, who received 25% of the royalties on sales, although Lewis was listed as the sole author.
John Willard Toland was an American writer and historian. He is best known for a biography of Adolf Hitler and a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II-era Japan, The Rising Sun.
Barbara Ellen Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
William Joseph Kennedy is an American writer and journalist who won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his 1983 novel Ironweed.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. She is the author of nine novels and a collection of essays. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the International Dublin IMPAC Award and The Orange Prize. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, Absolution was awarded the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
Anthony Doerr is an American author of novels and short stories. He gained widespread recognition for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Oscar Jerome Hijuelos was an American novelist.
Margaret Ayer Barnes was an American playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Josephine Winslow Johnson was an American novelist, poet, and essayist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1935 at age 24 for her first novel, Now in November. She is the youngest person to win the Pulitzer for Fiction. Shortly thereafter, she published Winter Orchard, a collection of short stories that had previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, The St. Louis Review, and Hound & Horn. Of these stories, "Dark" won an O. Henry Award in 1934, and "John the Six" won an O. Henry Award third prize the following year. Johnson continued writing short stories and won three more O. Henry Awards: for "Alexander to the Park" (1942), "The Glass Pigeon" (1943), and "Night Flight" (1944).
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.
The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1931.
Sonia Nazario is an American journalist mostly known for her work at Los Angeles Times. She has spent her career writing about social and social justice issues, focusing especially on immigration and immigrant children who come to the United States from Central America. In 2003, while working at the Los Angeles Times, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her six-part series titled "Enrique's Journey," which followed the harrowing story of a young Honduran boy's journey to the US when he was sixteen years old. "Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother" was published as a book in 2006 and became a national bestseller.
Margaret Wilhelmina Wilson was an American novelist. She was awarded the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for The Able McLaughlins.
Elizabeth Strout is an American novelist and author. She is widely known for her works in literary fiction and her descriptive characterization. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine, and her experiences in her youth served as inspiration for her novels–the fictional "Shirley Falls, Maine" is the setting of four of her nine novels.
Elizabeth Madox Roberts was a Kentucky novelist and poet, primarily known for her novels and stories set in central Kentucky's Washington County, including The Time of Man (1926), "My Heart and My Flesh," The Great Meadow (1930) and A Buried Treasure (1931). Her distinct, rhythmic prose characterizes all of her writings. Robert Penn Warren called "The Time of Man" a classic; the eminent Southern critic and Southern Review editor Lewis P. Simpson counted her among the half dozen major Southern renascence writers. Three book-length studies of her work, three collections of critical articles, a major conference on her 100th birthday, a collection of her unpublished poems, and a flourishing Roberts Society that generates 20-odd papers at its annual April conferences have yet to revive wide interest in her work.
Margaret Louise Coit was a writer of American history books for both adults and children. In 1935 when she was still in high school in Greensboro, North Carolina, Coit—like many people in the South at that time—venerated John C. Calhoun. In her eyes his life was heroic. Calhoun was "a congressman and vice president under two presidents" and "later a symbol of the lost cause of defending slavery." After studying journalism and history for several years at the Woman's College at Greensboro, she worked for many years researching Calhoun's life, resulting in the publication of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book entitled John C. Calhoun, American Portrait.
Audrey Wurdemann Auslander was an American poet. She was the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry at the age of 24, for her collection Bright Ambush.
The Night Watchman is a novel by Louise Erdrich first published on March 3, 2020, by HarperCollins. The novel is set in the 1950s. This is Erdrich's sixth standalone novel following Future Home of the Living God. The novel was inspired by the life of Erdrich's grandfather who motivated and inspired other members of the Turtle Mountain Reservation to resist the Indian termination policies of the 1940s-1960s. The Night Watchman is the first novel that Erdrich has written that is set on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.
