Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Robert Frost: Collected Poems

Newbery Award: The Cat Who Went to Heaven by Elizabeth Coatsworth (Macmillan)

The Story of Babar by Jean and Cecile de Brunhoff is an instant best-seller in Europe.

Also published in 1931:
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. Also an instant bestseller. Ms. Buck became famous for her novels of ancient and contemporary China.

Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer. I have a copy of this classic that I got as a wedding present, and I have consulted it from time to time. The cookbook’s greatest strength is that it has recipes for almost any dish that one would think of cooking. It was first privately published in 1931 by Irma S. Rombauer, a homemaker in St. Louis, Missouri, who was struggling emotionally and financially after her husband’s suicide the previous year. In 1936, a commercial publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, picked up the book.
The 1936 introduction to Joy of Cooking:

“Although I have been modernized by life and my children, my roots are Victorian. This book reflects my life. It was once merely a private record of what the family wanted, of what friends recommended and of dishes made familiar by foreign travel and given an acceptable Americanization. In the course of time there have been added to the rather weighty stand-bye of my youth the ever-increasing lighter culinary touches of the day. So the record, which to begin with was a collection such as every kitchen-minded woman possesses, has grown in breadth and bulk until it now covers a wide range.”