Annal:1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1981. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1981 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1981 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1980 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 22.31
“When a true genius appears in the world,
You may know him by this sign, that the dunces
Are all in confederacy against him.”
—Jonathan Swift, “Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting”
“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once.”
So enters one of the most memorable characters in American fiction, Ignatius J. Reilly.
John Kennedy Toole’s hero is one, “huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans’ lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures” (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times). Ignatius J. Reilly is a flatulent frustrated scholar deeply learned in Medieval philosophy and American junk food, a brainy…
- 1982 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1981 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1980 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 22.32
On an Illinois farm in the 1920s, a man is murdered, and in the same moment the tenous friendship between two lonely boys comes to an end. In telling their interconnected stories, American Book Award winner William delivers a masterfully restrained and magically evocative meditation on the past. “A small, perfect novel.”—Washington Post Book World.
Godric: A Novel
- 1981 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- Score: 6.31
Frederick Buechner’s Godric “retells the life of Godric of Finchale, a twelfth-century English holy man whose projects late in life included that of purifying his moral ambition of pride…Sin, spiritual yearning, rebirth, fierce asceticism—these hagiographic staples aren’t easy to revitalize but Frederick Buechner goes at the task with intelligent intensity and a fine readiness to invent what history doesn’t supply. He contrives a style of speech for his narrator—Godric himself—that’s brisk and tough-sinewed…He avoids metaphysical fiddle, embedding his narrative in domestic reality—familiar affection, responsibilities, disasters…All on his own, Mr. Buechner has managed to reinvent projects of self-purification and of faith as piquant matter for contemporary fiction [in a book] notable for literary finish…Frederick Buechner is a very good writer indeed.” —Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review
