After watching the 2009 film The Road and being so moved by the realism and bleakness of the movie, I hoped to read the novel someday. Seeing that the novel won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction made me wonder if I was missing out by never reading a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in my life.
There are 90 Pulitzer Prize award-winning novels out there, so obviously I don’t want to read them all right now. So which ones are the best of the best? I looked at ratings data from Amazon.com
10. The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk
9. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
8. Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
7. Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
6. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
5. The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
3. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
2. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
1. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
There you go, if you could read only one Pulitzer Prize award-winning novel in your life, it should be Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. It has a 5-star rating on Amazon.com out of over 2,000 reviews. It should be a great book. I’ll get back to you here if I ever decide to read it.
Postscript: I did eventually read The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It made an impression on me and is now one of my favorite works of fiction.
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