This week, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. But some years, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama or Fiction isn’t awarded at all. Here’s a look at those years when the judges just couldn’t agree.

In 2006, three plays were announced as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for drama: Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter (about a prostitute in Amsterdam), Rolin Jones’ The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow (an agoraphobic woman builds a robot to explore the world), and Christopher Durang’s Miss Witherspoon (a spiritual comedy). Ultimately none of those plays won the award. Reportedly, the intense family drama Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire was a shoe-in, but the Pulitzer committee abruptly changed the eligibility period, pushing Rabbit Hole to 2007 (when it did win). With that play out of the running, the judges couldn’t reach a consensus.
In 1997, plays for the Drama award were whittled down to three finalists: The Last Night of Ballyhoo by Alfred Uhry, Pride’s Crossing by Tina Howe, and Collected Stories by Donald Margulies. The panel of theater critics on the jury rejected all of the finalists, in part because the plays were too obscure. Collected Stories was staged in Costa Mesa, California (far from Broadway) and no one on the panel had seen it. Pride’s Crossing had been staged in San Diego, but pulled by the author when she publicly announced it needed a rewrite. That left Uhry’s play, which didn’t have enough support on the committee to get the nod.
The standout novel of 1974, as determined by the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. The jury unanimously selected the novel to be honored, but the larger Pulitzer Prize board rejected the recommendation. The reason: The book contains one very gross passage involving human waste; the board didn’t think such content was becoming of a Pulitzer honoree.
Similarly, the greater Pulitzer board rejected the fiction committee’s recommendation just three years later. The jury selected Norman MacLean’s A River Runs Through It, but was overruled for reasons never made totally clear. Oddly, a special Pulitzer Prize in the field of “Letters” was awarded to Alex Haley for his biographical novel Roots.