Since 1918, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has attempted something quietly audacious: naming, each year, a single work of fiction by an American author, preferably one dealing with American life. The result is less a list of perfect books than a running argument about what American fiction is for, taking in undisputed landmarks like The Grapes of Wrath, Beloved and To Kill a Mockingbird alongside forgotten winners, controversial choices and the occasional year when the board, notoriously, awarded nothing at all. Read in sequence, the winners form an accidental history of the United States itself: its wars, migrations, families and reinventions, told one novel at a time. Whether you're chasing the canon or hunting for the overlooked gems between the giants, this list is one of the great structured reading projects in American literature.
Angel Down
Daniel Kraus
James
Percival Everett
Night Watch
Jayne Anne Phillips
Trust
Hernan Diaz
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver
The Netanyahus An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
Joshua Cohen
The Night Watchman
Louise Erdrich
The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
The Overstory
Richard Powers
Less
Andrew Sean Greer
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead
The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen
All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
The Orphan Master's Son
Adam Johnson
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
Tinkers
Paul Harding
Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
March
Geraldine Brooks
Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
The Known World
Edward P. Jones
Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
Empire Falls
Richard Russo
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon
Interpreter Of Maladies
Jhumpa Lahiri
The Hours
Michael Cunningham
American Pastoral
Philip Roth
Martin Dressler The Tale of an American Dreamer
Steven Millhauser
Independence Day
Richard Ford
The Stone Diaries
Carol Shields
The Shipping News
Annie Proulx
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Robert Olen Butler
A Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley
Rabbit at Rest
John Updike
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Oscar Hijuelos
Breathing Lessons
Anne Tyler
Beloved
Toni Morrison
A Summons to Memphis
Peter Taylor
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Foreign Affairs
Alison Lurie
Ironweed
William Kennedy
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
Rabbit Is Rich
John Updike
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
The Executioner's Song
Norman Mailer
The Stories of John Cheever
John Cheever
Elbow Room
James Alan McPherson
Humboldt's Gift
Saul Bellow
The Killer Angels
Michael Shaara
The Optimist's Daughter
Eudora Welty
Angle of Repose
Wallace Stegner
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford
House Made of Dawn
N. Scott Momaday
The Confessions of Nat Turner
Turner, Nat
The Fixer
Bernard Malamud
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
Porter, Katherine Anne
The Keepers of the House
Grau, Shirley Ann
The Reivers
William Faulkner
The Edge of Sadness
Edwin O'Connor
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Advise and Consent
Allen Drury
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
Robert Lewis Taylor
A Death in the Family
James Agee
Andersonville
MacKinlay Kantor
A Fable
William Faulkner
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
The Caine Mutiny
Herman Wouk
The Town
Conrad Richter
The Way West
Alfred Bertram Guthrie (Jr.)
Guard of Honor
James Gould Cozzens
Tales of the South Pacific
James A. Michener
