Living Canon

Pulitzer Prizes 1959: Complete list of winners

The 1959 Pulitzer Prizes celebrated a particularly adventurous year in American letters, with winners who pushed their respective genres in surprising directions. Arthur Walworth’s monumental biography Woodrow Wilson took the prize in biography, offering readers a sweeping portrait of one of the nation’s most consequential presidents. Meanwhile, Archibald MacLeish’s J. B., a modern verse drama that reimagines the Book of Job in contemporary America, won the drama award with its theatrical innovation and philosophical depth—a bold choice that underscored the Pulitzer committee’s willingness to honor experimental work.

The 1959 Pulitzer Prize winners across all categories demonstrated the breadth of American intellectual life in the late 1950s. Robert Lewis Taylor’s picaresque novel The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters captured the fiction prize with its sprawling adventure narrative, while Leonard D. White’s scholarly The Republican Era: 1869-1901 provided historians with a comprehensive study of a transformative period. In poetry, Stanley Kunitz’s Selected Poems 1928-1958 honored a career of quiet mastery, showcasing work that had matured over three decades.

Whether you’re researching Pulitzer Prize history, tracking the 1959 Pulitzer Prize winners, or simply curious about what was considered the best of American literature that year, this cohort offers a fascinating snapshot of postwar American culture. Here are the complete 1959 Pulitzer Prize winners:

Biography

Drama

  • Cover of J. B. J. B. by Archibald Macleish

Fiction

History

Poetry