The Book Prize Index

Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris

Richard Kluger

Ashes to Ashes is a monumental history of the American tobacco industry: its awesome and ironic success in developing the cigarette, modern society's most widespread instrument of self-destruction, into America's most profitable consumer product: its energized, work-obsessed royal families, the Dukes and the Reynoldes, and their battling successors like the eccentric autocrat George Washington Hill and the feisty Joseph F. Cullman: its generations of entrepreneurial geniuses: its cunning business strategies and marketing dazzle: its deft political power plays: its relentless, often devious attacks on antismoking forces in science, public health, and government. And there is the weirdly symbiotic relationship of an industry geared at any cost to sell, sell, sell cigarettes, and an American public habituated to ignore all warnings and buy, buy, buy.

HistoryAmerican History · medium confidenceAmerican History81 signalsLlm Classifier: American History -> American HistoryKeyword Classifier: American History -> American HistoryKeyword Classifier: Business & Economics -> Business & EconomicsDisease, Epidemics & DrugsPublic Health SystemsMedicine, Health & the Body

Award History

1 wins · 4 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
Pulitzer Prize in General NonfictionMajor1997WinnerSecondary source
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current InterestMajor1996FinalistSecondary source
National Book Critics Circle Award for NonfictionMajor1996FinalistSecondary source
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History1996FinalistSecondary source
View all award history (4)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Philip Morris45%
    • George Washington Hill38%
    • Joseph F. Cullman38%

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    The tobacco industry’s strategies enabled cigarettes to become a long-sustained, highly profitable consumer product by energizing profit-making development and by using political and scientific power to undermine antismoking efforts.

    Model confidence 62%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    45 / 100 academic

    Trade / academic crossover

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 60%.