Annal:1980 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1980. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1980 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1980 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1979 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 22.3
In what is arguably his greatest book, written in 1979, 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. To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death.
Norman Mailer tells Gilmore’s story—and those of the men and women caught up in his procession toward the firing squad—with implacable authority, steely…
- 1980 NBA–1st Novel winner
- 1980 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- Score: 16.3
An inventive, hypnotic novel about frienship and family, love and war, madness and beauty, and, above all, “birdness.” Wharton crafts an unforgettable tale—one that suggests another notion of sanity in a world that is manifestly insane.
- 1980 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1980 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1979 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.3
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff.
At Lonoff’s, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff’s and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of…
