Forgotten novels I discovered on the Pulitzer winners list

I love the earlier winners of the Pulitzer Prize. When I started finding out about winners for fiction, I had the pleasant experience of discovering some great novels that I had never heard of. Without my interest in the Pulitzer winners, I likely would never have learned of them. On the other hand, there are some very well-known early winners of the prize that we all know: The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton, Arrowsmith (1925) by Sinclair Lewis, The Good Earth (1931) by Pearl S. Buck, Gone With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell, The Yearling (1938) by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck. It was interesting for me to discover that these novels that I had enjoyed reading had won the Pulitzer Prize.

Now for the novels that I had never heard of until I started searching for the Pulitzer winners. Here are the books that stand out for me as great winners of the Pulitzer that I discovered because they won the award. See how many of them you had heard of before you became interested in the Pulitzer winners.

One of Ours (1922) by Willa Cather

So Big (1924) by Edna Ferber

Scarlet Sister Mary (1928) by Julia Peterkin

Laughing Boy (1929) by Oliver LaFarge

The Store (1932) by T. S. Stribling

The picture at the top of this post shows my copy of each of these books and I am fortunate to have a 1st edition copy of all of them. The importance of literary awards has become clear to me as I realize that the novels listed above might go unnoticed by readers of good fiction if not for the Pulitzer Prize. For example, none of these novels was known to my wife or my daughter who were both English majors in college and avid readers after college.

So, if you are looking for a good Pulitzer winner to read, I highly recommend each of these five books. In future posts I will give my brief review and opinion of each these novels.