Living Canon

Pulitzer Prizes 1956: Complete list of winners

The 1956 Pulitzer Prizes marked a notable year for American letters, recognizing works that would cement themselves in the cultural canon for decades to come. Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems: North & South - A Cold Spring claimed the Poetry prize, continuing a tradition of the Pulitzer honoring some of the nation’s finest verse. In the Fiction category, MacKinlay Kantor’s sweeping Civil War novel Andersonville earned the award, while Richard Hofstadter’s influential The Age of Reform won History—a work that would shape how generations understood American progressivism. The Drama prize went to Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich’s adaptation of Diary of Anne Frank, bringing one of the era’s most important stories to the stage, and Talbot Faulkner Hamlin’s biography of Benjamin Henry Latrobe rounded out the winners, celebrating the architect who shaped early American architecture and infrastructure.

What made this particular year of the Pulitzer Prizes especially significant was the diversity of voices and subjects represented among the winners. The selections reflected a postwar American literary landscape grappling with history, identity, and artistic innovation—from Bishop’s intricate modernist poetry to the stark historical weight of Anne Frank’s legacy. These awards demonstrated the Pulitzer’s commitment to recognizing excellence across genres while also capturing the themes that preoccupied American writers and readers in the mid-1950s.

Here are the complete 1956 Pulitzer Prize winners:

Biography

Drama

Fiction

History

Poetry