Pulitzer Prize Trivia
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49 free Pulitzer Prize trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Pulitzer Prize trivia quiz covers America's best-known awards for journalism, books, drama and music, along with the extraordinary immigrant publisher who endowed them. The easy questions handle the basics: which university runs the prizes, how many are given, what the winners receive, and who Joseph Pulitzer's great rival was. From there it moves through how the juries and board actually work, which categories were added or renamed, and the fine print that separates a real 'nominee' from a mere entrant. The harder half is for literature and media buffs: the juries that were overruled to deny Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Albee and Pynchon; the ghostwriting scandal behind Profiles in Courage; Janet Cooke's fabricated story; the four double winners for Fiction; and Pulitzer's own life from mule hostler and Civil War cavalryman to the crowdfunding of the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. If you enjoyed our journalism or American literature quizzes, this is the deep dive on one prize. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the prize, the Fiction category and Joseph Pulitzer before publishing.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which rapper won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music?
Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar: earlier that year DAMN. had lost the Grammy for album of the year, yet it went on to win him the Pulitzer.
Q 02Which university administers the Pulitzer Prizes?
Columbia
Columbia: its president Seth Low turned down Pulitzer's 1892 offer to fund a journalism school, and only his successor Nicholas Murray Butler embraced the plan.
Q 03Which World War II photograph won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Photography?
The Iwo Jima flag raising
The Iwo Jima flag raising: Joe Rosenthal's shot of Marines hoisting the flag on Mount Suribachi became the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial.
Q 04Joseph Pulitzer was born in which country?
Hungary
Hungary: born in Makó, he tried to join the Austrian army, the French Foreign Legion and the British army, and all three turned him down.
Q 05Which Sinclair Lewis novel about an idealistic young doctor won a 1926 Pulitzer Prize that he refused?
Arrowsmith
Arrowsmith: Lewis turned the prize down, arguing such awards corrupt writers, yet in 1930 he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Q 06Which Pulitzer category is a gold medal rather than cash, awarded only to a news organisation?
Public Service
Public Service: The New York Times won it in 1972 for publishing the Pentagon Papers, which the Nixon administration had gone to court to suppress.
Q 07Which Toni Morrison novel won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?
Beloved
Beloved: that January, 48 Black writers and critics had published a protest in The New York Times Book Review after it lost the National Book Award.
Q 08Which novel won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a year after it was published?
To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee reworked it with her editor from a first draft titled Go Set a Watchman, which was finally published in 2015.
Q 09In 1965, the Pulitzer board rejected its music jury's call to honour which jazz composer?
Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington: then 66, he quipped that fate didn't want him to be too famous too young, and the board finally gave him a special citation in 1999.
Q 10Which newspaper's owner called the Pulitzers a 'mutual admiration society' and refused to compete until 1961?
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune: owner Robert McCormick saw the prizes as the work of East Coast cultural gatekeepers, so the paper sat them out from the late 1930s to 1960.
Q 11Which musical won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama?
Hamilton
Hamilton: Lin-Manuel Miranda began writing the show after reading Ron Chernow's 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton.
Q 12Which poet won a record four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry?
Robert Frost
Robert Frost: he left Harvard after two years as a student, and decades later he returned there to teach.
Q 13Which program won the first Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting, in 2020?
This American Life
This American Life: the show's team had earlier launched the podcast Serial as a spin-off.
Q 21Which Thomas Pynchon novel did the 1974 Pulitzer fiction jury unanimously recommend, only for the board to give no award?
Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow: board members privately called it unreadable, turgid, overwritten and in parts obscene.
Q 22Which Washington Post writer returned her 1981 Pulitzer after her story of a child heroin addict was found fabricated?
Janet Cooke
Janet Cooke: her invented eight-year-old addict was so convincing that Mayor Marion Barry had city police and health officials hunt for the boy.
Q 23Alex Haley settled a plagiarism suit over which book, honoured with a special Pulitzer citation in 1977?
Roots
Q 14Which James Michener book won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the first year under that name?
Tales of the South Pacific
Tales of the South Pacific: the renamed prize also let story collections compete, and Rodgers and Hammerstein turned the book into the musical South Pacific.
Q 15Which film dramatised the Boston Globe investigation into Catholic Church abuse cover-ups that won a 2003 Pulitzer?
Spotlight
Spotlight: after the Globe exposed the cover-up, Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as Archbishop of Boston in December 2002.
Q 16Which Pulitzer Prize administrator wrote the memoir behind Denzel Washington's film A Journal for Jordan?
Dana Canedy
Dana Canedy: her memoir grew out of a New York Times essay about her fiancé, a soldier killed in Iraq, and the journal he kept for their son.
Q 17In 1921 the Pulitzer trustees gave the fiction prize to The Age of Innocence over which novel?
Main Street
Main Street: the jury had picked Sinclair Lewis's novel, and observers say he was still resentful when he turned down a Pulitzer of his own five years later.
Q 18Which Hemingway novel was recommended for the 1941 Pulitzer but blocked by the university president as offensive?
For Whom the Bell Tolls
For Whom the Bell Tolls: Nicholas Murray Butler forced the board to change its vote, so no novel prize was given that year.
Q 19Which future president won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for a book believed ghostwritten by his speechwriter?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy: in 1957 columnist Drew Pearson told Mike Wallace's television audience that the book had been ghostwritten for him.
Q 20Which Albee play did the 1963 Pulitzer jury pick before the board withheld the drama prize?
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: the board objected to its profanity, and juror John Mason Brown, who had backed it with John Gassner, resigned in protest.
Roots: Harold Courlander said it copied passages from his novel The African, and in the settlement Haley acknowledged that material from it found its way into Roots.
Q 24Which Tony-winning musical won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama despite not being among the jury's nominees?
Next to Normal
Next to Normal: jury chair Charles McNulty publicly criticised the board for passing over the three plays his jury had nominated.
Q 25The introductory essay of which New York Times series won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary?
The 1619 Project
The 1619 Project: it grew into a school curriculum, which Florida officials later banned from the state's public schools.
Q 26As of 2026, which four authors have each won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice?
Tarkington, Faulkner, Updike, Whitehead
Tarkington, Faulkner, Updike, Whitehead: Tarkington's first winner, The Magnificent Ambersons, was later adapted for the screen by Orson Welles.
Q 27Which Thornton Wilder novel won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel?
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The Bridge of San Luis Rey: Tony Blair read from it at a 2001 memorial service for British victims of the September 11 attacks.
Q 28As of 2026, which two novelists share the record of four Pulitzer fiction nominations each?
Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth
Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth: Roth won once, for American Pastoral, but Oates has yet to win despite her four nominations.
Q 29Which Barbara Kingsolver novel shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with Hernan Diaz's Trust?
Demon Copperhead
Demon Copperhead: Kingsolver moved Dickens's David Copperfield to southern Appalachia, following a boy born to a teenage single mother in a trailer.
Q 30Which singer-songwriter received a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 2008 for his impact on popular music?
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan: when he won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature he stayed away from Stockholm, and the US ambassador to Sweden read his banquet speech.