Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

The Pulitzer Prize for the Novel was replaced in 1948 with the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

• 1948 James A. Michener - Tales of the South Pacific
• 1949 James Gould Cozzens - Guard of Honor
• 1950 A. B. Guthrie, Jr - The Way West
• 1951 Conrad Richter - The Town
• 1952 Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny
• 1953 Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
• 1954 no award given
• 1955 William Faulkner - A Fable
• 1956 MacKinlay Kantor - Andersonville
• 1957 no award given
• 1958 James Agee - A Death In The Family
• 1959 Robert Lewis Taylor - The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
• 1960 Allen Drury - Advise and Consent
• 1961 Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird
• 1962 Edwin O'Connor - The Edge of Sadness
• 1963 William Faulkner - The Reivers
• 1964 no award given
• 1965 Shirley Ann Grau - The Keepers Of The House
• 1966 Katherine Anne Porter - Collected Stories
• 1967 Bernard Malamud - The Fixer
• 1968 William Styron - The Confessions of Nat Turner Styron
• 1969 N. Scott Momaday - House Made of Dawn
• 1970 Jean Stafford - Collected Stories
• 1971 no award given
• 1972 Wallace Stegner - Angle of Repose
• 1973 Eudora Welty - The Optimists Daughter
• 1974 no award given¹
• 1975 Michael Shaara - The Killer Angels
• 1976 Saul Bellow - Humboldt's Gift
• 1977 no award given
• 1978 James Alan McPherson - Elbow Room
• 1979 John Cheever - The Stories of John Cheever
• 1980 Norman Mailer - The Executioner's Song
• 1981 John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
• 1982 John Updike - Rabbit Is Rich
• 1983 Alice Walker - The Color Purple
• 1984 William Kennedy - Ironweed
• 1985 Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs
• 1986 Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove
• 1987 Peter Taylor - A Summons to Memphis
• 1988 Toni Morrison - Beloved
• 1989 Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons
• 1990 Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
• 1991 John Updike - Rabbit At Rest
• 1992 Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres
• 1993 Robert Olen Butler - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
• 1994 E. Annie Proulx - The Shipping News
• 1995 Carol Shields - The Stone Diaries
• 1996 Richard Ford - Independence Day
• 1997 Steven Millhauser - Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
• 1998 Philip Roth - American Pastoral
• 1999 Michael Cunningham - The Hours
• 2000 Jhumpa Lahiri - Interpreter of Maladies
• 2001 Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
• 2002 Richard Russo - Empire Falls

¹ The fiction jury voted unanimously to grant the 1974 award to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but the rest of the Pulitzer panel overturned this decision. See Gravity's Rainbow for details.