Pulitzer Prizes 1966: Complete list of winners
The 1966 Pulitzer Prizes marked a year of retrospection and reflection, honoring established voices whose work had already shaped American letters. Arthur M. Schlesinger’s monumental A Thousand Days, a sweeping biography of President John F. Kennedy, captured the prize for biography, bringing fresh historical perspective to a presidency still raw in the nation’s memory. Meanwhile, Katherine Anne Porter received the fiction award for her Collected Stories, a recognition that felt overdue for one of America’s finest short story writers, whose career had spanned decades without yet receiving the Pulitzer’s highest honor.
The selections across the 1966 Pulitzer Prizes revealed the award’s traditional tastes that year: Perry Miller’s intellectual history The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War won in history, while Edwin Way Teale’s naturalistic meditation Wandering Through Winter triumphed in the general nonfiction category. Richard Eberhart, long a respected figure in American poetry, secured the poetry prize for his Selected Poems, continuing a pattern of the Pulitzers favoring established rather than emerging voices.
What stands out about these winners is their collective gravitas—each represented a lifetime of serious literary work rather than a debut or breakthrough moment. Here’s a look at the complete list of 1966’s distinguished recipients:
Biography
- A Thousand Days by Arthur M. Schlesinger
Fiction
Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter
General Nonfiction
- Wandering Through Winter by Edwin Way Teale
History
Poetry
Selected Poems by Richard Eberhart