Top 20 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels of All Time

From Depression-era epics to genre-bending modern masterpieces, these award-winning novels span a century of American storytelling, sweeping sagas next to quiet, intimate character studies. Which one earns your vote?

1

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee's 1961 winner about a small-town Alabama lawyer defending a Black man against a false rape charge, seen through his daughter's eyes.

1000pts

2

Lonesome Dove

Larry McMurtry's 1986 winner follows two retired Texas Rangers driving a cattle herd from the Rio Grande to Montana in the waning days of the Old West.

909pts

3

The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt's 2014 winner follows a boy who survives a museum bombing and clings for years to a stolen Dutch masterpiece painting.

844pts

4

Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout's 2009 winner weaves linked stories around a blunt, complicated retired schoolteacher in a small Maine coastal town.

757pts

5

Beloved

Toni Morrison's 1988 winner about a formerly enslaved woman haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed to spare her from slavery.

682pts

6

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides' 2003 winner follows a Greek-American intersex narrator tracing three generations of family secrets across a century.

584pts

7

The Known World

Edward P. Jones' 2004 winner explores the unsettling world of a Black slaveholder in antebellum Virginia and the community around him.

584pts

8

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2016 winner follows a communist double agent navigating divided loyalties among Vietnamese refugees in 1970s America.

454pts

9

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck's 1940 winner follows a displaced Oklahoma family's harrowing journey to California during the Great Depression.

454pts

10

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan's 2011 winner follows a sprawling cast connected to the music industry across decades in a structurally inventive novel.

454pts

11

The Road

Cormac McCarthy's 2007 winner follows a father and son walking through a charred, post-apocalyptic America in search of survival and hope.

273pts

12

American Pastoral

Philip Roth's 1998 winner traces the unraveling of a golden-boy athlete's idyllic life after his daughter commits an act of political violence.

273pts

13

The Color Purple

Alice Walker's 1983 winner traces a Black woman's journey from abuse and silence toward self-discovery and love in the early 20th-century South.

273pts

14

The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead's 2017 winner reimagines the Underground Railroad as a literal subterranean train system carrying an enslaved woman north.

273pts

15

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr's 2015 winner intertwines the lives of a blind French girl and a German boy soldier during the Second World War.

1pts

16

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson's 2005 winner is an aging Iowa preacher's tender, reflective letter to his young son about faith, family, and mortality.

1pts

17

A Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole's 1981 winner is a comic odyssey through New Orleans following the cantankerous, misfit genius Ignatius J. Reilly.

1pts

18

Kavalier and Clay

Michael Chabon's 2001 winner follows two Jewish cousins who create a comic-book empire in New York on the eve of World War II.

1pts

19

Less

Andrew Sean Greer's 2018 winner follows a struggling novelist who circles the globe to dodge his ex-lover's wedding invitation.

1pts

20

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway's 1953 winner about an aging Cuban fisherman locked in an epic struggle with a giant marlin far out at sea.

1pts