Book picks similar to
Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens


pulitzer
pulitzer-prize
fiction
pulitzer-prize-winners

Years of Grace


Margaret Ayer Barnes - 1930
    Her story reveals the beauty, the drama, and the passion that can lie unsuspected beneath a quiet exterior.

Scarlet Sister Mary


Julia Peterkin - 1928
    Rejecting the prevailing sentimental stereotypes of her times, she portrayed her black characters with sympathy and understanding, endowing them with the full dimensions of human consciousness. In these novels and stories, she tapped the richness of rural southern black culture and oral traditions to capture the conflicting realities in an African American community and to reveal a grace and courage worthy of black pride.

The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters


Robert Lewis Taylor - 1958
    This million-copy Pulitzer Prize-winning classic details the journey of Jaimie and his father from Kentucky to gold-rush California.

The Edge of Sadness


Edwin O'Connor - 1961
    There he is drawn into the unruly world of the Carmodys, a sprawling, prosperous Irish family teeming with passion and riddled with secrets. The story of this entanglement is a beautifully rendered tale of grace and renewal, of friendship and longing, of loneliness and spiritual aridity giving way to hope.

The Late George Apley


John P. Marquand - 1937
    Gently satirical and rich with drama, the novel moves from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression as it projects George Apley's world—and subtly reveals a life in which status and accomplishment mask disappointment and regret, a life of extreme and enviable privilege that is nonetheless an imperfect life.

The Able McLaughlins


Margaret Wilson - 1923
    This neglected novel tells the story of Wully McLaughlin coming home from the Civil War to find his sweetheart pregnant with another man’s child.

His Family


Ernest Poole - 1917
    His Family is the story of a sixty-year-old New York man who reflects on his life and the lives of his three daughters. The women represent three separate types - one maternal, the second devoted to social movements, and the third living a happy and carefree existence - and the father sees something of himself in each.

A Bell for Adano


John Hersey - 1944
    An Italian-American major during World War II wins the love and admiration of the local townspeople when he searches for a replacement for the 700 year-old town bell that had been melted down for bullets by the fascists.

Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story


Oliver La Farge - 1929
    At a ceremonial dance, the young, earnest silversmith Laughing Boy falls in love with Slim Girl, a beautiful but elusive "American"-educated Navajo. As they experience all of the joys and uncertainties of first love, the couple must face a changing way of life and its tragic consequences.

Lamb in His Bosom


Caroline Miller - 1933
    It was the first novel by a Georgia author to win a Pulitzer, soon followed by Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind in 1937. In fact, Lamb was largely responsible for the discovery of Gone With the Wind; after reading Miller's novel, Macmillan editor Harold S. Latham sought other southern novels and authors, and found Margaret Mitchell.Caroline Miller was fascinated by the other Old South—not the romantic inhabitants of Gone With the Wind, but rather the poor people of the south Georgia backwoods, who never owned a slave or planned to fight a war. The story of Cean and Lonzo, a young couple who begin their married lives two decades before the Civil War, Lamb in His Bosom is a fascinating account of social customs and material realities among settlers of the Georgia frontier. At the same time, Lamb in His Bosom transcends regional history as Miller's quietly lyrical prose style pays poignant tribute to a woman's life lived close to nature—the nature outside her and the nature within.

Early Autumn: A Story of a Lady


Louis Bromfield - 1926
    With a failed marriage behind her and an eighteen year old daughter to present to society, everyone is surprised to find that Sabine has returned, not as the pitiable and broken creature they expected, but as a strong and assured individual with an uncanny ability to see through the postures and pretenses of the society that oppressed her as a girl. With her bold independence and forthright nature, Sabine challenges the social order and becomes a catalyst for changes in the lives of the people around her.Bromfield's startling depth of insight into the characters of this novel and his brilliant portrayal of the challenges to old New England society earned him national recognition. Bromfield was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Early Autumn.

Journey in the Dark


Martin Flavin - 1943
    By turns admirable, pitiable, tough, noble, weak, futile, and brilliantly effective, a lonely man going nowhere in the dark, Sam Braden mirrors thousands like him who have put their familiar stamp upon the American way of life.He wanted wealth, and he got it. He wanted to belong to the social world in which the Wyatts moved so easily, and in time he did. Most of all he wanted Eileen Wyatt, and this too he achieved, but only after a fashion. To explain this average man who had wanted success above everything, and who achieved an enviable degree of it and yet who never escaped from the prison of his loneliness, Martin Flavin takes the reader back to the friendly, democratic world that existed along the Mississippi in the Eighties, to the influences which shaped the boy and fixed the pattern of the man.

Honey in the Horn


H.L. Davis - 1935
    It is about the coming of age of an orphan boy named Clay Calvert, but it is also the about the trials of the pioneers who came to Oregon following the American Dream. Through the characters that Clay meets along the way, the author introduces the readers to the various occupations of the settlers of that era. (wikipedia)

Advise and Consent


Allen Drury - 1959
    It begins with Senate confirmation hearings for a liberal Secretary of State and concludes two weeks later, after debate and controversy have exploded this issue into a major crisis."I can recall no other novel in which there is so well presented a president's dilemma when his awful responsibility for the nation's interest conflicts with a personal code of good morals." (The New York Times)

In This Our Life


Ellen Glasgow - 1941
    The story of how two marriages are wrecked and a great wrong done to an innocent Negro boy, is told largely as it is viewed by Asa Timberlake, sixty years of age, husband of a hypochondriac wife, father of two daughters, one utterly selfish and feminine, the other courageous and gailant but confused and unhappy." Book Rev. DigestPulitzer Prize, 1942