The real date: 1921, not 1967
The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction did so in 1921, not in 1967. Edith Wharton was honoured that year for The Age of Innocence, a novel of New York society in the 1870s. At the time the category was not called “Fiction” at all. It was the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, and the name changed to Fiction only in 1948.
The 1967 prize went to Bernard Malamud for The Fixer, the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman wrongly imprisoned in tsarist Russia. Malamud’s win belongs to a different story from Wharton’s, but the two years are a useful pair: they show the prize at the start of its life and at the middle of the twentieth century.
How the prize began
The Pulitzer Prizes come from the will of the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, and they are administered by Columbia University. The first prizes were given in 1917. The Novel prize arrived in 1918, and its early winners were mostly writers who are now little read.
The wording of the prize shaped what it rewarded. Its early terms, as usually quoted, asked for a novel that best presented the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the wording was later loosened. That early emphasis is often used to explain a famous episode around Wharton’s win. Reportedly, the jury preferred Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, but the governing board chose The Age of Innocence. The story is usually told with some caution, since accounts differ in detail, but it shows how contested these decisions could be from the start.
Edith Wharton’s win
Wharton was already an established writer when she won. She published The Age of Innocence in 1920, and it looks back at a tightly bound social world with a sharp, ironic eye.
Her win did not open the floodgates immediately, but it did set a pattern. Over the next two decades, women won the Novel prize repeatedly, which is notable against the background of a publishing world that was far from equal.
Women novelists the prize honoured
A short list gives a sense of the range. These are winners generally credited by the Pulitzer organisation, given with the year of the award:
| Year | Writer | Work |
|---|---|---|
| 1921 | Edith Wharton | The Age of Innocence |
| 1923 | Willa Cather | One of Ours |
| 1932 | Pearl S. Buck | The Good Earth |
| 1937 | Margaret Mitchell | Gone with the Wind |
| 1939 | Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings | The Yearling |
| 1961 | Harper Lee | To Kill a Mockingbird |
| 1966 | Katherine Anne Porter | The Collected Stories |
| 1973 | Eudora Welty | The Optimist’s Daughter |
This is not a complete list. Several other women won in the 1920s and 1930s, and the prize was not awarded at all in some years. Treat the table as a sample rather than a full roll.
The range is wide. Mitchell’s novel was an enormous commercial success when it won, while Lee’s and Porter’s awards came in the early 1960s, within a few years of 1967.
Where 1967 fits
Malamud’s win in 1967 came in a year when American fiction was busy. Readers could pick up the work of writers who were later grouped as New Journalism writers, and the counterculture produced its own literary world, including the Merry Pranksters writing and publishing scene around Ken Kesey. Abroad, One Hundred Years of Solitude introduced many readers to magical realism. Among all this, the Pulitzer committee gave its award to a traditional, moral novel about injustice and endurance, the kind of book that prize juries have often favoured.
The Fixer was also recognised by the National Book Award, so the Pulitzer was part of a broader pattern of recognition. If you are looking at the year’s reading in general, the shelf of 1967 novels is far wider than the prize winner alone.
After 1967
The women’s list continued to grow after Malamud’s year. Eudora Welty’s 1973 win came a few years later, and Toni Morrison won in 1988 for Beloved, a novel about the aftermath of slavery. Morrison’s prize is often discussed alongside the broader widening of who was recognised in American letters, a process that had begun slowly with Wharton and the women who followed her.
The prize itself also changed. The board has altered its rules and juries over the years, and the category now covers a wider range of work than the early “wholesome” wording suggested. Readers using the prize as a guide to literary history should remember that it reflects the choices of particular juries at particular times, not a settled verdict on quality.
Why the date matters
Questions about the “first woman” to win a prize often get tangled, so a few points are worth keeping straight.
- The prize’s earliest years had no fiction category under that name; “Novel” was used until 1948.
- Wharton’s 1921 win is generally cited as the first by a woman in this category.
- Later categories, such as general non-fiction, were separate and are not part of this count.
- Dates in some popular accounts are given by the year of the book’s publication rather than the year of the award, which can shift things by a year.
Another way to see the history is through the Nobel committee, which honoured the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlof in 1909, more than a decade before Wharton’s win and in a different system entirely. The two prizes reward different things, so the comparison is only a rough one.