Pulitzer Prizes 1937: Complete list of winners

The 1937 Pulitzer Prizes cemented what would become some of the most enduring works in American literature and history. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind claimed the Novel prize, a sweeping historical epic that had already captured readers’ imaginations since its publication the previous year. Meanwhile, Robert Frost’s A Further Range brought the Poetry award to one of America’s most beloved poets, while the Drama prize went to Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman for their hilarious comedy You Can’t Take It With You, a play about an eccentric family that still entertains audiences today. The awards also recognized serious scholarship that year: Allan Nevins won Biography for Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration, and Van Wyck Brooks took the History prize for The Flowering of New England 1815-1865, a cultural history that helped establish New England’s intellectual legacy during a formative American period.

What makes the 1937 Pulitzer Prizes particularly striking is how the winners span from popular entertainment to deep historical scholarship, all representing significant achievements in their respective fields. Frost, Mitchell, Hart, and Kaufman were already household names, while Nevins and Brooks represented the kind of serious historical and biographical work that the Pulitzer committee valued alongside fiction and drama. It was a banner year that reflected American culture at a moment of transition—the nation emerging from the Depression, popular entertainment flourishing, and historians reassessing the nation’s past.

Here are the complete winners from the 1937 Pulitzer Prizes:

Biography

• Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration by Allan Nevins

Drama

• You Can’t Take It With You by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman

History

• The Flowering of New England 1815-1865 by Van Wyck Brooks

Novel

• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Poetry

• A Further Range by Robert Frost