You’ve Seen the Movie…Now Read the Book!

You’ve Seen the Movie…Now Read the Book!

Winners of Academy Awards®  for Best Picture which are based upon Novels, Plays and Short Stories

The number following the movie title is the total number of Academy Awards won by that motion picture, including “Best Picture.” If the original title of the work is different than that of the movie, it is listed in italic print. Where there is no Dewey Decimal call number indicated, the book is shelved in the Adult Fiction under the author’s last name. The year listed after the author’s name is the original publication date of the book, play or story. For more information on movies based on previously published written works, see Enser’s Filmed Books and Plays (1928-1991) and The New York Times “Film Reviews” (1913-1988), or you can look up movie credits on the World Wide Web on a variety of Web sites, including The Internet Movie Database or the All-Movie Guide. The “Oscars®” are awarded in the Spring for motion pictures released during the previous year. The official Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Web site is at www.oscars.org.

Other books made into movies, and novelizations or movies after the fact, can be searched in the Lincoln City Libraries catalog by title and title keyword and searching for the name of the movie. All books owned by Lincoln City Libraries are hotlinked to their entries in our library catalog, so that you may check on their current availability. If you see a title on this list that is not hotlinked to our collection, please consider ordering it through our Interlibrary Loan department. 

Click the DVD icons in the list below to check on the availability of the motion picture versions of these “Best Picture” winners.

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1930		All Quiet on the Western Front	[2]	Erich Maria Remarque	1928 *
1931		Cimarron	[3]	Edna Ferber	1929
1932		Grand Hotel	[1]	Vicki Baum	1929 **
1934		It Happened One Night	[5]	Samuel Hopkins Adams	Night Bus (short story)
1935		Mutiny on the Bounty	[1]	Charles B. Nordhoff and James Norman Hall	1932
1938		You Can’t Take it With You	[2]	George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart [812.08 Kau]	(Three plays by Kaufman & Hart)
1939		Gone With the Wind	[10]	Margaret Mitchell	1936
1940		Rebecca	[2]	Daphne Du Maurier	1938
1941		How Green Was My Valley	[5]	Richard Llewellyn	1940
1942		Mrs. Miniver	[6]	Joyce Maxtone Graham (as “Jan Struther”)	1940
1943		Casablanca	[3]	Murray Burnett	Everybody Comes to Rick’s (play)
1945		The Lost Weekend	[4]	Charles R. Jackson	1944
1946		The Best Years of Our Lives	[8]	MacKinlay Kantor	Glory for Me (novel)
1947		Gentlemen’s Agreement	[3]	Laura Z. Hobson	1946
1948		Hamlet	[4]	William Shakespeare [822.33 ShaS7nf]	ca. 1600 The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke
1949		All the King’s Men	[3]	Robert Penn Warren	1946
1950		All About Eve	[6]	Mary Orr	The Wisdom of Eve (short story)
1953		From Here to Eternity	[8]	James Jones	1951
1956		Around the World in 80 Days	[5]	Jules Verne	1872 ***
1957		The Bridge on the River Kwai	[7]	Pierre Boulle	1954 The Bridge Over the River Kwai ****
1958		Gigi	[9]	Colette	1944
1959		Ben-Hur	[11]	Lew Wallace	1880
1961		West Side Story	[10]	Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim (based upon a concept of Jerome Robbins) [Music 782.14 Ber]	1957 #
1963		Tom Jones	[4]	Henry Fielding	1749 The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling
1964		My Fair Lady	[8]	Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner	1956 (based upon the play “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw 1912 [822 Sh2pyg]) ##
1966		A Man For All Seasons	[6]	Robert Bolt	1960 A Man for All Seasons: A Play of Sir Thomas More [822 B63m Plays of Our Time]
1967		In the Heat of the Night	[5]	John Ball	1965
1968		Oliver!	[6]	Charles Dickens	1837 Oliver Twist, Or, The Parish Boy’s Progress. By “Boz” ###
1969		Midnight Cowboy	[3]	James Leo Herlihy	1965
1972		The Godfather	[3]	Mario Puzo	1969
1974		The Godfather Part II	[6]	Mario Puzo	1969 The Godfather
1975		One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest	[5]	Ken Kesey	1962
1979		Kramer vs. Kramer	[5]	Avery Corman	1977
1980		Ordinary People	[4]	Judith Guest	1976
1983		Terms of Endearment	[5]	Larry McMurtry	1975 †
1984		Amadeus	[8]	Peter Shaffer [822 Sha]	1980
1989		Driving Miss Daisy	[4]	Alfred Uhry [812 Uhr]	1987
1990		Dances With Wolves	[7]	Michael Blake	1988
1991		The Silence of the Lambs	[5]	Thomas Harris	1988
1993		Schindler’s List	[7]	Thomas Keneally	1982 (also known as “Schindler’s Ark“)
1994		Forrest Gump	[6]	Winston Groom	1986
1996		The English Patient	[9]	Michael Ondaatje	1992
2002		Chicago	[6]	(based on the 1975 musical by Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb; based on a 1926 play by Maurine Dallas Watkins)	1926 (play) 1975 (musical)
2003		The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King	[11]	J.R.R. Tolkien	1955
2004		Million Dollar Baby: Stories From the Corner	[4]	F.X. Toole	2000 (originally known as “Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner“)
2007		No Country for Old Men	[4]	Cormac McCarthy	2005
2008		Slumdog Millionaire	[8]	Vikas Swarup	2005 (originally known as “Q&A“)
2010		The King’s Speech	[4]	Mark Logue	2010 (Biography George VI King of Britain)
2012		Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History	[3]	Antonio J. Mendez and Matt Baglio	2012
2013		12 Years a Slave	[3]	Solomon Northup	1853 (Biography Northup)
2014		Birdman	[4]	Raymond Carver	Based, in part, on the 1981 short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love“
2015		Spotlight	[6]	various reporters	based on a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories by a variety of reporters, in The Boston Globe.
2016		Moonlight	[8]	Tarell Alvin McCraney	Based on author McCraney’s unpublished play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue“
2017		The Shape of Water	[4]	Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus	Novel released in 2018, the year after the film’s release.
2020		Nomadland	[6]	Jessica Bruder	2017 Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century  ††

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Also note: The 1998 Best Picture, Shakespeare in Love, was written by screenwriter Marc Norman and playwright Tom Stoppard and is based on the life, times, and plays of William Shakespeare, particularly “Romeo and Juliet.”

*	original published in German, “Im Western Nichts Neues”
**	originally published in German, “Menschen Im Hotel”
***	originally published in French, “Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingt Jours”
****	originally published in French, “Le Pont de la Rivière Kwai”
#	inspired by the play “Romeo and Juliet” by William Shakespeare, written ca. 1594 and titled “The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet” in one of its earliest authoritative editions, which was itself based upon a poem, “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet” written by Arthur Brooke in 1562, which was based in turn upon a French translation of an Italian work “La sfortunata morte di dui infelicissimi amanti” by Matteo Bandello (1485-1561), with the characters “Romeo e Giuletta”. Elements of the story also appear in earlier Italian works, “Il Novellino” written by Masuccio Salemitano in 1474, and “Istoria novellamente ritrovata di due Nobili Amanti” by Luigi da Porto; similarly, “Hamlet” is based upon an English play from the 1580s, probably written by Thomas Kyd, and can be traced back to Norse/Icelandic folklore.
##	translated into German from the English original for premiere in Germany; published in English in 1920
###	first published in serial form under the full title in “Bentley’s Miscellany”, 1837-1839, and then as a book in 3 volumes; second edition shortened to Oliver Twist; “Boz” was Dickens’ early pen name
†	filmed partially in Lincoln, Nebraska
††	filmed partially in Scottsbluff, Nebraska

 

Original printed list March 1999 bwc | Last updated May 2023 sdc — includes the Academy Awards through 2023