The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin is a definitive history of the global petroleum industry from the 1850s through the book's publication in December 1990, four months after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and one month before Operation Desert Storm. It became a major bestseller and won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
The Prize took 10 years complete, and involved a team of researchers as well as Yergin's extensive connections to the oil industry. The book includes 61 pages of notes and a 26-page bibliography sourcing some 700 other books, government and petroleum company archives, oral histories, and 80 interviews, among them James Schlesinger and Armand Hammer.
In 1992, The Prize was adapted into an eight-part documentary narrated by Donald Sutherland, which aired on PBS and was watched by 20 million people. An abridged audiobook came out in 1991. In 2024, an unabridged audiobook was released with a new epilogue narrated by Yergin. A trade paperback version is available from Simon & Schuster's Free Press imprint. A sequel to The Prize, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, was published by Penguin Press in 2011.
The title of The Prize comes from a 1912 Winston Churchill quote, when he was First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill described the geopolitical ramifications of moving British ships from "the finest supply of the best steam coal in the world, safe in our mines under our own land" to a riskier but much more powerful fuel source with which "we should be able to raise the whole power and efficiency of the Navy to a definitely higher level; better ships, better crews, higher economies, more intense forms of war power... mastery itself was the prize of the venture."
