Skip to main content
For distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Three thousand dollars ($3,000).

The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields (Viking)

Carol Shields receives the Pulitzer Prize from Columbia University President George Rupp.

Winning Work

The Stone Diaries

The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman's story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.

Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling misconnections she discovers between. Daisy's struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era.

(From the jacket)

Copyright: 1995, Viking Press

Biography

Carol Shields was born in the United States and holds dual citizenship here and in Canada. Her previous books include The Orange Fish, Swann, Various Miracles, and The Republic of Love. Her newest novel,The Stone Diaries, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and received Canada's prestigious Governor's General Award.

She lives in Manitoba.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Fiction in 1995:

The Jury

Joel Conarroe(chair )

president

Charles Johnson

author, Pollock Professor of English

Nancy Huddleston Packer

professor of English emerita

Winners in Fiction

1995 Prize Winners