Emerson-Thoreau Medal Recipients

2022          Maxine Hong Kingston, novelist

2019          Margaret Atwood, poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and teacher

2016          Toni Morrison, novelist, essayist, and teacher

2013          Philip Roth, novelist 

1989          Norman Mailer, novelist and critic

1979          James T. Farrell, novelist, critic, and essayist

1977          Saul Bellow, teacher, novelist, critic of society

1975          Robert Penn Warren, novelist, poet, critic, teacher

1970          I. A. Richards, poet, critic, teacher of critics

1969          Hannah Arendt, social and political historian and philosopher

1968          John Crowe Ransom, poet and critic

1967          Joseph Wood Krutch, critic, biographer, and naturalist

1966          Edmund Wilson, writer and critic

1965          Lewis Mumford, teacher, critic, and philosopher

1963          Mark Van Doren, poet, critic, and teacher

1962          Katherine Anne Porter, novelist

1961          Samuel Eliot Morison, biographer, historian, and scholar

1960          Henry Beston, author and naturalist

1959          Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet, critic, and playwright

1958          Robert Frost, poet