Living Canon

Pulitzer Prizes 1932: Complete list of winners

The 1932 Pulitzer Prizes arrived during one of America’s darkest economic moments, yet the year’s winners demonstrate the resilience and ambition of the nation’s literary and artistic voices. Pearl S. Buck’s sweeping novel The Good Earth captured the Pulitzer for Fiction, introducing American readers to a richly imagined portrait of rural Chinese life that would become a cultural phenomenon. Meanwhile, on the Broadway stage, George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and Ira Gershwin made history by winning the Drama prize for Of Thee I Sing, a satirical musical that broke new ground by proving that musical theater could be both entertainingly irreverent and worthy of the Pulitzer’s highest recognition. These victories underscored how the nation’s creatives were wrestling with both intimate human stories and the larger social questions of their era.

The 1932 Pulitzer Prizes also honored historical and biographical achievement with characteristic gravitas. General John J. Pershing’s My Experiences in the World War took the History category, offering firsthand perspective on America’s role in the Great War just over a decade past, while Henry F. Pringle’s biography of Theodore Roosevelt won in the Biography category, celebrating the larger-than-life president whose legacy still dominated American political discourse. Poet George Dillon rounded out the year with The Flowering Stone, a collection that reflected the introspective literary climate of the early Depression years. Together, these five works reveal how the Pulitzer Prizes in the 1930s continued to champion a broad range of American achievement across fiction, drama, history, and poetry.

Here’s a closer look at the complete 1932 winners:

Biography

Drama

  • Of Thee I Sing by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin

History

Novel

Poetry