Established upon the 75th anniversary of W. W. Norton & Company, the Norton Scholar’s Prize was awarded annually during the years 1998 to 2008 for an outstanding undergraduate essay on a literary topic.
The Norton Scholar's Prize competition has now been retired, but a new writing competition, the Norton Writer's Prize, has taken its place. Click here to learn more about the Norton Writer's Prize.
The eleven winners of the Norton Scholar's Prize are listed below. You can click on their titles to read the winning essays.
2008 Winner
“Nation-making and Movie-making”: Cinema in Midnight’s Children
Helen Cespedes
Barnard College
2007 Winner
“Making a Profit of My Policy”: Ideological Tensions in Sixteenth-Century English Identity and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta
Kathryn C. Fore
University of California, Irvine
2006 Winner
"Directitude? what's that?": A Verbal Blunder and Unstable Identity in Coriolanus
Garth Kimbrell
University of Kansas
2005 Winner
The Communal Space Between: Reconciliation in Emerson’s "Experience"
Rachel Banner
Oakland University
2004 Winner
The Opacity of Evil: The Turn from Theodicy in The Winter’s Tale
Matthew Valdiviez
University of New Mexico
2003 Winner
Reading Alcibiades as an Appropriative Self
Boris Rodin Maslov
University of California, Berkeley
2002 Winner
Rachel and the Household Gods: An Interpretation of Genesis 31
Susannah Rutherglen
Yale University
2001 Winner
In Others’ Words: Michelle Cliff’s Epigraphical Black Atlantic Structure
Erin McMullen
Ball State University
2000 Winner
"Rapine Sweet": The Rape of Proserpina and Eve’s Fall
Jessica Bulman
Yale University
1999 Winner
The Fantasy of Orality in Absalom, Absalom!
Caleb Smith
University of California, Berkeley
1998 Winner
"I will live content elsewhere": The Importance of Exile in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Andrzej Niekrasz
St. Louis University