Annal:1985 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1985. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1985 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1984 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1984 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 22.35
Alison Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is both a splendid comedy and poignant love story about two American academics in London. Virginia Miner, an unmarried tenured professor, is an Anglophile on leave to research a book. Fred Turner, a teacher at the same university, is recently separated, flat broke and miserable in this city where the rain never seems to end. The separate paths of these two lonely and naive innocents abroad lead them to strikingly similar destinations of newfound passion…and unexpected love.
By turns hilarious and intensely moving, Foreign Affairs is a dazzling accomplishment—timely, captivating and unforgettable.
- 1985 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- Score: 6.35
I Wish This War Were Over, runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize, is a coming-of-age story of love and pain set against the tumultuous background of World War II; “something rare and precious: a novel of genuine distinction” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post.
Leaving the Land: A Novel
- 1985 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- Score: 6.35
Leaving the Land deals with contemporary rural America, and it does so with an exceptional fidelity to detail, circumstance, and feeling that captures the modern condition in the countryside: the winds of change bearing down hard on a once remote and deeply rooted way of life.
Douglas Unger has a sharply focused but widely ramifying story to tell. Its compass is 12 miles, the distance between the Hogan farm and the small town of Nowell, off in the desolate “gumbo” land of the western Dakotas. Its principal figure is Marge Hogan, a bright, pretty, spunky girl and then women who dreams of the bright lights of Rapid City but whose destiny is to stay where she is. Early on, she works side by side with her father at the grueling, dispiriting tasks of turkey raising, her two brothers having gone off to World War 11 and both having been killed. Evenings she sadly sorts through men left behind by the war for a husband who can help with the farm and eventually take over. Just as she is about to marry the best of a bad lot, a convoy of trucks arrives in Nowell, along with a man in a snappy…
