Living Canon

Pulitzer Prizes 1978: Complete list of winners

The 1978 Pulitzer Prizes marked a year of remarkable diversity across American literature and nonfiction, honoring writers whose works examined everything from personal relationships to the cosmos itself. That year’s winners reflected a particular appetite for innovation and intellectual ambition—from James Alan McPherson’s celebrated Elbow Room, which won Fiction for its interconnected stories exploring African American life, to Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden, a sweeping meditation on human intelligence and evolution that brought scientific wonder to a general audience. These selections demonstrated how the Pulitzer Prizes, one of America’s most prestigious honors, continued to recognize not just literary excellence but also the power of ideas to reshape how readers understand themselves and their world.

The 1978 Pulitzer Prize winners in the traditional categories showed particular strength in biographical and historical work. Walter Jackson Bate’s monumental Samuel Johnson claimed the Biography prize, while Alfred D. Chandler’s The Visible Hand won History with its groundbreaking examination of American business management. On the performance side, Donald L. Coburn’s The Gin Game took the Drama prize, offering audiences an intimate, two-character study that proved devastating in its emotional economy. Meanwhile, Howard Nemerov’s Collected Poems rounded out the year’s selections, affirming that the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry remained committed to recognizing career-spanning achievement and technical mastery.

Below you’ll find the complete list of 1978 Pulitzer Prize winners across all major categories:

Biography

Drama

Fiction

General Nonfiction

History

Poetry