Best Pulitzer Prize Winners of All Time According to Readers

Wharton became the first woman to ever win the Pulitzer with The Age of Innocence, her stellar and elegantly told tale of forbidden love and the stifling nature of the class system in Gilded Age New York.

Newland Archer, a lawyer from a well-to-do family, is set to marry the pretty but sheltered May Welland. But his plans for a simple and content life are changed forever when he meets May's cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska. She's surrounded by scandal following her disastrous marriage and desire for a divorce, but inspired by her rejection of societal expectations, Newland falls for her. Unfortunately, the upper classes are an unforgiving lot and won’t allow such a match.

It’s one of the great love stories of the 20^th century, and it inspired the legendary movie, directed by Martin Scorsese!

Decades after its publication in 1987, Toni Morrison's fifth novel (and her most famous) still inspires and shocks. It's both the book that helped Morrison win the Nobel Prize and one of the most banned novels in American schools. A survey by The New York Times ranked it as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006. It really is that good.

Inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, Beloved follows the story of Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, and her daughter, Denver, as they deal with a haunting that reveals the trauma of their pasts and the scars of slavery upon both the body and psyche.

American fiction simply wouldn’t be what it is without To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s fablelike tale of childhood innocence and the fight for justice in the face of abject racism is a true literary icon and one of the biggest selling novels of all time.

Atticus Finch, the lawyer who defends a Black man falsely accused of an abhorrent crime, is considered one of the most beloved characters in all of fiction. If you’ve read the book, reread it. It has, alas, remained forever relevant.

All the hot girls are reading Lonesome Dove nowadays. Larry McMurtry’s doorstop of a Western epic – it’s over 800 pages long! – has become a surprise BookTok hit in recent years. We’re not surprised. Even Western genre skeptics can get behind this grand tale of masculinity, friendship, and unrequited love in the Old West.

A group of retired Texas rangers work together to drive a cattle herd thousands of miles from Texas to Montana, and along the way, they come to understand themselves and the birth of America. 

Colson Whitehead is a two-time Pulitzer medalist, and both of his winning novels -- The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys - are exceptional. We've gone with the former for this list for its deft and ingenious reimagining of history.

Here, the Underground Railroad, an organised route of secret networks that helped enslaved people flee the country to freedom, is a literal railroad. A group of characters, including the enslaved Cora, fight to escape the South and outrun the slave catchers in the hopes of a better future. Blending allegory, realism, history, and modernity, this book is a 21st-century masterpiece.

John Kennedy Toole died 11 years before his magnum opus was published, so he never got to see it become one of the most beloved novels in Southern American fiction, and also one of the funniest. 

A Confederacy of Dunces is the story of Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy and misanthropic wannabe intellect who still lives at home with his mother and who traverses New Orleans in search of employment and entertainment. The book and its hero have become icons of New Orleans, thanks to Toole's vivid depiction of the city and its dialects.