The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power is Daniel Yergin's 1990 history of the global petroleum industry from the 1850s to 1990. The Prize became a bestseller, helped by its release date in December 1990, four months after the invasion of Kuwait ordered by Saddam Hussein and one month before the U.S.-led coalition began the Gulf War to oust Iraqi troops from that country. The book eventually went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

An unabridged audiobook version of The Prize was released in 2024, with an epilogue narrated by its author, reflecting on the relevance of the book’s messaging, more than 30 years after its original publication date.

The Prize has been called the "definitive" history of the oil industry, even a "bible".

In 1992 The Prize won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

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Sources

Ten years in the making, The Prize draws on extensive research carried out by the author and his staff, including Sue Lena Thompson, Robert Laubacher, and Geoffrey Lumsden. Daniel Yergin has excellent connections with the oil industry, and is the Chairman of a private energy consulting firm called Cambridge Energy Research Associates,

Yergin's history has 61 pages of notes and a bibliography of 26 pages that lists as sources 700 books, articles, and dissertations, 60 government documents, 28 "data sources", more than 34 manuscript collections, fifteen government archives, eight oral histories, and four oil company archives (Amoco, Chevron, Gulf, and Royal Dutch Shell), and 80 personal interviews with key individuals like James Schlesinger and Armand Hammer.

Adaptations

In 1992–1993, The Prize was the basis for an eight-part, eight-hour documentary television series titled The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power, narrated by Donald Sutherland and broadcast by PBS. The series is said to have been seen by 20 million people in the United States.

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The book is available as an abridged audiobook, released in 1991 and read by Bob Jamieson, as well as an unabridged version released in 2024 and read by Michael David Axtell.