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10 Famous Novels That Didn’t Win the Pulitzer Prize
Notable losers include ‘Catch-22,’ ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘The Catcher in the Rye’
One of the most perversely elite clubs in American literature consists of famous novels that lost the Pulitzer Prize for fiction but went on to become classics. Here are some of the most noteworthy losers and the books that beat them in the years listed below.
1962
Loser: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Winner: The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor
1957
Loser: Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
Winner: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
1952
Loser: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Winner: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
1941
Loser: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Winner: Nobody. No award given.
1937
Loser: Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Winner: Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
1930
Losers: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and The Sound and the Fury by…
