2008

Junot Díaz. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the fuku - the ancient curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still dreaming of his first kiss, is only its most recent victim - until the fateful summer that he decides to be its last. ~Book jacket

2007

Cormac McCarthy. The Road

America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst the destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world that is utterly devastated.

2006

Geraldine Brooks. March

From Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, and has added adult resonance to portray the moral complexity of war and a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealism.

2005

Marilynne Robinson. Gilead

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition. He tells of the tension between his father and grandfather and he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton.

2004

Edward Jones. The Known World

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, boot maker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor--William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation as well as his own slaves. When he dies his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.

2003

Jeffrey Eugenides. Middlesex

Spanning eight decades, Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.

2002

Richard Russo. Empire Falls

In this droll, unsentimental, and occasionally hilarious novel, Richard Russo tells the story of a big-hearted man who becomes the unlikely hero of a small town with a glorious past but a dubious future.

2001

Michael Chabon. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

A stunning novel in which the tragicomic adventures of a couple of boy geniuses reveal much about what happened to America in the middle of the twentieth century.

2000

Jhumpa Lahiri. Interpreter of Maladies

Traveling from India to New England and back again, the stories in this extraordinary debut collection unerringly chart the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations.

1999

Michael Cunningham. The Hours

Cunningham Draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair.

1998

Philip Roth. American Pastoral

American Pastoral presents a vivid portrait of how the innocence of Swede Levov is swept away by the times - of how everything industriously created by his family in America over three generations is left in a shambles by the explosion of a bomb in his own bucolic backyard.

1997

Steven Millhauser. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

Young Martin Dressler begins his career as a helper in his father's cigar store. In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top. His visions grow more and more fantastical as he plans his ultimate creation: the Grand Cosmo, in which he attempts to capture the entire world and its dreams.

1996

Richard Ford. Independence Day

Frank Bascombe is no longer a sportswriter, yet he's still living in Haddam, New Jersey, where he now sells real estate. This decent, appealingly bewildered, profoundly observant man is wrenched, gradually and inevitably, out of his private refuge. And in this embattled ascent Richard Ford captures the mystery of life - in all its conflicted glory - with grand humor, intense compassion and transfixing power.

1995

Carol Shields. The Stone Diaries

The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman's story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age.

1994

E. Annie Proulx. The Shipping News

E. Annie Proulx focuses on a Newfoundland fishing town in a tale about a third-rate newspaperman and the women in his life-- his elderly aunt and two young daughters-- who decide to resettle in their ancestral seaside home. The transformation each of the character undergoes following move is profound.

1993

Robert Olen Butler. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

In his first book of short fiction, Butler offers a compelling chorus of voices that together depict the experiences of the many Vietnamese expatriates living in America.

1992

Jane Smiley. A Thousand Acres

When an Iowa patriarch decides to turn over his thriving farm to his three daugters, he sets off a series of tragic events that will eventually rip apart his family.

1991

John Updike. Rabbit at Rest

In this final episode of the author's " Rabbit " saga, ex-basketball player Harry " Rabbit " Angstrom has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo and a second grandchild. His son is behaving erratically and his wife decides in mid-life to become a working girl. Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live.

1990

Oscar Hijuelos. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

It's 1949. It's the era of the mambo, and two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the grand stage of New York. The Castillo brothers, workers by day, become by night stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings. This is their moment of youth--a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with nostalgia and deep afection.

1989

Anne Tyler. Breathing Lessons

During a ninety-mile drive to her best friend's husband's funeral, Maggie and her husband, Ira, recall and revaluate the details of their twenty-eight-year marriage.

1988

Toni Morrison. Beloved

Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade.

1987

Peter Taylor. A Summons to Memphis

A richly observed, finely tuned novel about how a charming, elderly widower's remarriage is foiled by his meddlesome, unmarried, middle-aged children, told by that master story-teller, Peter Taylor, against the backdrop he has made so distinctive--the society of urban Tennessee.

1986

Larry McMurtry. Lonesome Dove

A love story and an epic of the frontier, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last, defiant wilderness of America. Richly authentic, beautifully written, Lonesome Dove is a book to make readers laugh, weep, dream and remember.

1985

Alison Lurie. Foreign Affairs

This flawless novel earned the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and once again illustrates Lurie's talent for capturing the subtle ironies of human relationships. Two professors are sent to London on research assignments but end up spending more time together than on their work!

1984

William Kennedy. Ironweed

Francis Phelan is a man trying to make peace with the ghosts of his past and present.

1983

Alice Walker. The Color Purple

This landmark work is Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that also won the American Book Award and established her as a major voice in modern fiction. The New York Times Book Review hailed its "intense emotional impact", and the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a work to stand beside literature of any time and place".

1982

John Updike. Rabbit is Rich

Rabbit, basically decent but no intellectual, is ten years down the road from Rabbit Redux . Updike's hero, now a middle-aged Toyota dealer, still seeks peace and contentment -- items not standard equipment in his life.

1981

John Kennedy Toole. A Confederacy of Dunces

A spectacular, Pultizer Prize-winning novel by a master of comedy, beloved by readers and critics alike. The place is the French Quarter, the characters, denizens of New Orleans's lower depths.

1980

Norman Mailer. The Executioner's Song

America's most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America's prisons who---after robbing two men and killing them in cold blood--insisted on dying for his crime.

1979

John Cheever. The Stories of John Cheever

Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation." From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in "The Enormous Radio" to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" and "The Swimmer," Cheever tells us everything we need to know about "the pain and sweetness of life."

1978

James Alan McPherson. Elbow Room

A beautiful collection that explores blacks and whites today, Elbow Room is alive with warmth and humor. Bold and very real, these 12 stories explor e a world many find difficult to define.

1977

No Award given.

1976

Saul Bellow. Humboldt's Gift

An old friend acts from the grave to give a gentle but resilient middle-aged intellectual an opportunity for triumph over all that makes his life seem staid and superfluous.

1975

Michael Shaara. The Killer Angels

A sweeping journey to the heart of a country sundered by war--a dramatic and unforgettable novel that brings to life the Battle of Gettysburg.

1974

No Award given.

1973

Eudora Welty. The Optimist's Daughter

The story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Alone in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.

1972

Wallace Stegner. Angle of Repose

The magnificent story of four generations in the life of an American family. A wheelchair-bound retired historian embarks on a monumental quest: to come to know his grandparents, now long dead. The unfolding drama of the story of the American West sets the tone for Stegner's masterpiece.

1971

No Award given.

1970

Jean Stafford. Collected Stories

1969

N. Scott Momaday. House Made of Dawn

The story of a young American Indian struggling to reconcile the traditional ways of his people with the demands of the 20th century.

1968

William Styron. The Confessions of Nat Turner

Set in 1831, The Confessions Of Nat Turner tells--in his own words--of a black man who awaits death in a Virginia jail cell. His name is Nat Turner and he is a slave, a preacher, and the leader of the only effective slave revolt in the history of that 'peculiar institution.'

1967

Bernard Malamud. The Fixer

Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.

1966

Katherine Anne Porter. Collected Stories

Four complete stories from one of America's most anthologized writers. Includes: "The Cracked Looking Glass", "The Grave", "Magic", and "Flowering Judas".

1965

Shirley Ann Grau. The Keepers of the House

The Keepers of the House is a novel of immense power that builds slowly, in layers, to an overarching realization both terrible and satisfying. It is the story of William Howland and Margaret Carmichael and their love for each other, told by William's granddaughter, Abigail.

1964

No Award given.

1963

William Faulkner. The Reivers

This grand misadventure is the story of three unlikely thieves, or reivers: 11-year-old Lucius Priest and two of his family's retainers. In 1905, these three set out from Mississippi for Memphis in a stolen motorcar. The astonishing and complicated results reveal Faulkner as a master of the picaresque.

1962

Edwin O'Connor. The Edge of Sadness

1961

Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird". A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man charged with the rape of a white girl.

1960

Allen Drury. Advise and Consent

Advise and Consent is the story of the nomination of Robert Leffingwell for Secretary of State, and the battle within the Senate to both defeat him and confirm him.

1959

Robert Lewis Taylor. The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters

1958

James Agee. A Death in the Family

In its lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee has created an overwhelmingly powerful novel of innocence, tenderness, and loss that should be read aloud for the sheer music of its prose.

1957

No Award given.

1956

MacKinlay Kantor. Andersonville

This is a story about the infamous Andersonville prison of Civil War fame, into which tens of thousands of Northerners were inhumanely confined under obscene conditions.

1955

William Faulkner. A Fable

1954

No Award given.

1953

Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea

A triumphant yet tragic story of an old Cuban fisherman and his relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream combines the simplicity of a fable, the significance of a parable, and the drama of an epic.

1952

Herman Wouk. The Caine Mutiny

When the commanding officer of the U.S.S. Caine is transferred, a new captain, strict disciplinarian Philip Francis Queeg, replaces him. But Queeg's actions go beyond strictness into psychopathology as he brings the ship and its crew to the brink of destruction. This necessitates a brutal shipboard court-martial that threatens by turns to clear or condemn him.

1951

Conrad Richter. The Town

The final chapter in The Awakening Land triology; it concludes the saga of Sayward Wheeler and her family as they finish turning the Ohio wilderness into a bustling city.

1950

A. B. Guthrie, Jr. The Way West

Finely crafted and timelessly entertaining, The Way West won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished fiction in 1950. Dick Summers returns to guide a group of settlers on the hazardous wagon train to Oregon...

1949

James Gould Cozzens. Guard of Honor

Balances a vast cast of intricately enmeshed characters as they react over the course of three tense days to a racial incident on a U.S. Air Force training base in Florida in 1942.

1948

James A. Michener. Tales of the South Pacific

Enter the exotic world of the South Pacific, meet the men and women caught up in the drama of a big war. The young Marine who falls madly in love with a beautiful Tonkinese girl. Nurse Nellie and her French planter, Emile De Becque. The soldiers, sailors, and nurses playing at war and waiting for love in a tropic paradise.

1947

Robert Penn Warren. All the King's Men

This classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on american politics. It describes the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power.

1946

No Award given.

1945

John Hersey. A Bell for Adano

Presiding over the small Sicilian village of Adano during World War II, an Italian-American major wins the love and admiration of the natives when he searches for a replacement for the 700-year-old town bell that had been melted down for bullets by the Fascists.

1944

Martin Flavin. Journey in the Dark

1943

Upton Sinclair. Dragon's Teeth

1942

Ellen Glasgow. In This Our Life

1941

No Award given.

1940

John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath

Forced from their home, the Joad family is lured to California to find work; instead they find disillusionment, exploitation, and hunger.

1939

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The Yearling

A young boy living in the Florida backwoods is forced to decide the fate of a fawn he has lovingly raised as a pet.

1938

John Phillips Marquand. The Late George Apley

Sweeping us into the inner sanctum of Boston society, into the Beacon Hill town houses and exclusive private clubs where only the city's wealthiest and most powerful congregate, this novel gives us--through the story of one family and its patriarch, the recently deceased George Apley--the portrait of an entire society in transition.

1937

Margaret Mitchell. Gone with the Wind

A monumental classic considered by many to be not only the greatest love story ever written, but also the greatest Civil War saga.

1936

Harold L. Davis. Honey in the Horn

1935

Josephine Winslow Johnson. Now in November

1934

Caroline Pafford Miller. Lamb in His Bosom

A young couple begins their married lives on the eve of the Civil War. The story of the poor people of the American South who never owned a slave nor planned to fight a war.

1933

T. S. Stribling. The Store

1932

Pearl S. Buck. The Good Earth

This great modern classic depicts life in China at a time before the vast political and social upheavals transformed an essentially agrarian country into a world power. Nobel Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life--its terrors, its passions, its ambitions, and rewards. Includes biographical and historical information and more.

1931

Margaret Ayer Barnes. Years of Grace

1930

Oliver La Farge. Laughing Boy

Captures the essence of the Southwest in the early 1900s -- and depicts a young Native American couple experiencing all the uncertainties and joys of first love.

1929

Julia Peterkin. Scarlet Sister Mary

Scarlet Sister Mary is the story of a sexy, independent, and outspoken woman who lives to please herself. Abandoned by her husband, the heroine takes many lovers, loses her firstborn son, and eventually "finds peace" as a church member, although she refuses to give up her love charm and her gold hoop earrings.

1928

Thornton Niven Wilder. The Bridge of San Luis Rey

"The Bridge of San Luis Rey" opens in the aftermath of an inexplicable tragedy-- a tiny foot-bridge in Peru breaks, and five people hurtle to their deaths. For Brother Juniper, a humble monk who witnesses the catastrophe, the question in inescapable. Why those five? Suddenly, Brother Juniper is committed to discover what manner of lives they led-- and whether it was divine intervention or a capricious fate that took their lives.

1927

Louis Bromfield. Early Autumn

1926

Sinclair Lewis. Arrowsmith

Lewis portrays the medical career of Martin Arrowsmith, a physician who finds his commitment to the ideals of his profession tested by the cynicism and opportunism he encounters in private practice, public health work, and scientific research. The novel reaches its climax as its hero faces his greatest challenges amid a deadly outbreak of plague on a Caribbean island.

1925

Edna Ferber. So Big

The unforgettable story of Selina Peake Dejong, her marriage, widowhood, eventual success as a truck farmer, and of her son, Dirk. In So Big, Ferber simultaneously created a vivid picture of turn-of-the-century Chicago and dealt with the (still) contemporary issues of poverty, Americanization, family tensions, sexism, and success.

1924

Margaret Wilson. The Able McLaughlins

1923

Willa Cather. One of Ours

Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it.

1922

Booth Tarkington. Alice Adams

Social climber Alice tries to push her clodhopper family to the background and assumes airs to win the love of an amiable, wealthy young man.

1921

Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence

When the Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe, fleeing her brutish husband, her rebellious independence and passionate awareness of life stir the educated sensitivity of Newland Archer, already engaged to be married to her cousin May Welland. As the consequent drama unfolds, Edith Wharton's sharp ironic wit and Jamesian mastery of form create a disturbingly accurate picture of men and women caught in a society that denies humanity while desperately defending "civilization".

1920

No Award given.

1919

Booth Tarkington. The Magnificent Ambersons

In addition, it is a view of Indianapolis' evolution from a major marketing center to a great industrial city. It adds a new dimension to one's understanding of the coming of the Industrial Age of the State of Indiana.

1918

Ernest Poole. His Family