It’s hard to believe that 1970 is already half a century in the past! So I thought, for this Throwback Thursday, I would share with you the winners of the Pulitzer Prizes in poetry and fiction from fifty years ago. While we don’t have the individual book that won in poetry (Untitled Subjects), many of the poems from this book are contained in the author’s selected poems, which I have linked below.

Poetry: Untitled Subjects by Richard Howard (contained in this book)

Fiction: Collected Stories by Jean Stafford

It’s the new year, and so we’re looking at the novel… The New Year! Before reading this, I hadn’t read anything by Pearl S. Buck before. In fact, I knew very little about her. She was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1938)! She had also won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for her novel The Good Earth, which we also have at the library. The New Year is one of her later novels; she died in 1973.

The New Year by Pearl S. Buck

I decided that I specifically would not look up any information about this book before reading it – the copy I got from the Cedarburg Public Library is old enough that it’s been rebound, so there’s not even a blurb on the back. It’s so rare today to go into a book completely blind that I thought I would grab the chance. I’m glad I did – the book gets off to quite a start. If you also want to go in blind, request it now instead of clicking the “read more” button!

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced recently – along with the 2018 prize, which was skipped last year. The 2019 winner is Peter Handke, and the 2018 winner is Olga Tokarczuk – clicking their names will take you to a list of their works in our catalog. There’s a great deal of controversy surrounding the prize, which you can read more about in the New York Times.

But this is Throwback Thursday, so we’re looking into the past. 70 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to novelist William Faulkner “for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” And since the Nobel Prize is not given for a specific work, I thought I would highlight what would have been his most recent novel when he received the prize in 1949.

Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner