Which novel by Caroline Miller won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1934?

Which novel by Caroline Miller won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1934? The answer is Lamb in His Bosom.

Published in 1933, Lamb in His Bosom is Caroline Miller’s novel about a poor white woman growing to maturity in the rural South before the Civil War. Its characters face poverty, childbirth, family hardship, violence, and the demanding rhythms of everyday life in an isolated coastal Georgia community.

Miller wrote the novel in regional language, preserving local speech patterns and cultural attitudes rather than presenting the setting through polished standard English. That use of vernacular helped give the book its distinctive sense of place and contributed to its immediate popularity.

The novel won the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, as the fiction category was then known, and also received France’s Prix Femina in the same year. It is often confused with The Yearling, which won the prize in 1939, or with The Great Meadow, a different historical novel by Elizabeth Madox Roberts.