SOURCE: Stuckey, W. J. “Joseph Pulitzer and His Prizes.” In The Pulitzer Prize Novels: A Critical Backward Look, pp. 3-25. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.

[In the following excerpt, Stuckey provides biographical and historical context for Joseph Pulitzer, the founder of the Pulitzer Prizes, and for the award itself.]

The life story of Joseph Pulitzer, founder of the Pulitzer prizes in journalism, letters, and music, fits beautifully into a familiar pattern of American success. Pulitzer arrived in this country in 1864 at the age of seventeen, without money and with almost no competence in the English language. By a combination of hard work, shrewdness, thrift, perseverance, some luck and some opportunism, he made his way relentlessly to financial eminence. When he died in 1911, Pulitzer left a fortune of almost nineteen million dollars, including two large and prosperous newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World.¹

Like some other self-made millionaires of the late nineteenth century, Joseph Pulitzer also left behind an ambiguous reputation as both an exploiter and a benefactor of the public. Pulitzer's newspapers helped expose public and private abuse of power and led campaigns for political and social reform, but they were also blamed, even by sympathetic critics, with helping debase the standards of American journalism through stunts, sensationalism, and in other ways that catered to the taste of the masses.² Pulitzer himself seemed to have felt that in the conduct of his newspapers he had been a model of integrity. For despite what might seem to more objective observers as a deliberate courting of the lowest taste, Pulitzer evidently felt that in turning out a “cheap,” “bright,” “interesting” newspaper, he was giving the people what they required. The profits he made from the pennies of the poor were not just so much money in the bank; they were a return on service rendered the public. In his newspaper columns and feature articles, he brought news down to the people's level; on his editorial page he took issue with the “purse potentates” and battled for the people with “earnest sincerity.”³

Whatever Pulitzer's deepest motives may have been and whatever his severest critics may have thought these were, his devotion to the interests of the common people and his own self-interest were, in his mind, inseparable. Though rich and successful himself, he despised the privileged classes and still emotionally identified himself with the poor and the disenfranchised, a class to which his early poverty and immigrant status had consigned him. Pulitzer was also a moral pragmatist. That is, he knew from practical experience that to expand and prosper in mid-nineteenth-century America, a newspaper had to be not only cheap and popular but also “morally” sound. Without morals, he once wrote, no newspaperman can hope to succeed.⁴ If this seems crass and hypocritical, it is also commonsensical, in the tradition of Ben Franklin.

While he was still a fairly young man, Pulitzer's health failed and he had to surrender direct management of his newspapers to subordinates. Although he continued to keep in touch, receiving reports and issuing commands by telegram or cable, he now had time for other things, including the disposition of his fortune and the establishment of several endowments, including one for his favorite project, a journalism college. The establishment of such a school, Pulitzer felt, would raise the standards of American newspapers and put journalists on somewhat the same footing as doctors and lawyers. He did not mean to make scholars or intellectuals of apprentice journalists, of course, but only to give them enough history, law, literature, and morality to help them carry on their careers successfully.⁵ In 1890, Pulitzer approached Harvard University with an offer of one million dollars if the university would undertake sponsorship of his school. The offer was turned down by President Eliot. Two years later, Pulitzer made a similar proposal to Columbia University, and it was also rejected by President Low and the university's trustees.⁶

Off and on for another ten years Pulitzer brooded over his project, revising, polishing, and attempting to make it more acceptable to the academic world. Then in 1903 he submitted a revised plan to Columbia University's new president, Nicholas Murray Butler. President Butler, as it turned out, was more sympathetic to the idea of a college of journalism. This time the Columbia trustees accepted the one million dollars and undertook to establish Joseph Pulitzer's school.⁷ Then, while public announcements were being prepared, Pulitzer began negotiations with Columbia for the establishment of another favorite project, a series of annual prizes and scholarships in journalism and letters. To persuade the trustees to undertake this additional responsibility, Pulitzer offered to add another million dollars to the endowment of the new journalism school—provided that half the income from this additional million would be given away each year as cash prizes in journalism and letters. This second million with its attendant responsibilities was also accepted by Columbia, and establishment of the Pulitzer prizes was thereby assured.⁸

In his negotiations with Columbia, Pulitzer displayed some of the same stubbornness that had characterized many of his dealings with subordinates on the World. He was willing to put his journalism college and yearly prizes into Columbia's care, but he wished to make certain that they would be managed according to his specifications. Although he was too ill himself to take a hand in setting up the journalism school, he made certain that its initial character was shaped by journalistic rather than academic minds: he arranged with Columbia for the creation of an Advisory Board, to be appointed by himself, to help launch his college and to take charge of the prizes in letters and journalism.

Although Pulitzer gave this board the authority to determine the standards of excellence to be looked for in the prize-winning works, he could not forbear stipulating the standards by which he meant the board to be guided. The intent of these terms as Pulitzer set them down was quite explicit, though the meaning was exceedingly vague. For the four prizes in letters (that is, for the novel, an original American play, a work of American history, and an American biography), the judges were instructed to look mainly for patriotism, good manners, and good morals. Only the prize in American history was to be given “for the best book of the year” in that category. The novel prize, according to official announcements, was to be awarded “annually, for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood. $1000.”⁹ This wording, given out to newspapers and repeated year after year to jurors in letters of instruction and enshrined in the yearly announcement of the novel prize-winner, was not exactly as Joseph Pulitzer had specified it. In his detailed instructions to Columbia, Pulitzer had stipulated that the prize-winning novel should reflect “the whole atmosphere of American life”; someone in the Columbia administration—Nicholas Murray Butler, presumably—changed whole to wholesome.¹⁰ From the standpoint of consistency the change made sense, of course, but in coming out explicitly for wholesomeness the Columbia authorities would make it more difficult for their best jurors to exercise their own judgment, and would encourage the rest to play it safe and pick books that would not offend “respectable” taste.

From a certain point of view it could be said that the Pulitzer authorities were simply creatures of their own time, merely translating into too simple language the taste and prejudice of the late Victorian age. One recalls, for instance, from Henry James's famous essay, “The Art of Fiction,” that Walter Besant listed as one of the chief requirements for the novel a “conscious moral purpose.”¹¹ The phrase “conscious moral purpose,” of course, admits the possibility of a writer's including in his novel both “bad” and “good” characters, whereas the phrase “presenting the wholesome atmosphere of American life” and “the highest standards of American manners and manhood” suggest that only books fit for a Sunday school library qualified for a Pulitzer prize in fiction. Certainly Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby Dick, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, or Crane's The Red Badge of Courage could not have qualified. Nor could James's The Ambassadors, nor, technically even Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham, which comes closer to fulfilling the spirit of these conditions than any other important American novel published during Pulitzer's lifetime.

Naïve as such literary standards were, they would not have caused as much difficulty in the 1880's or even in the early 1900's as they did after 1917, the year the first prizes were awarded: for by then American fiction had begun to mirror and often encourage the social revolution that was sweeping away the code of polite behavior that governed the public lives of middle-class Americans—a generally accepted standard that might have given the Pulitzer terms some relevance. In fact, the success of much of the new fiction—John Dos Passos' Three Soldiers, Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises—was to depend in part on the reader's awareness that the standards of conventional morality were being questioned. By 1925 the criteria set down by Pulitzer (and amended, presumably, by Nicholas Murray Butler) were irrelevant even to second- and third-rate American novels.

It is to Joseph Pulitzer's credit that, although he left his administrators a set of naïve literary standards, he also left them the means to set themselves free. Pulitzer's will provided that any of the conditions he had drawn up for the granting of these prizes could be changed by the Advisory Board when rendered necessary by the passing of time or if such changes or alterations seemed “conducive to the public good.”¹² Almost from the beginning there were problems with the official terms. Younger jurors in particular felt constrained by the emphasis on “wholesomeness.” The Advisory Board, however, doubtless at the insistence of Nicholas Murray Butler, held onto these terms for eleven years and then changed them only after the award to The Bridge of San Luis Rey in 1928 had clearly violated the requirement that the prize novel deal with American life. After that decision, wholesome was dropped back to the whole of Pulitzer's original wording and the “manners and manhood” clause was eliminated. The new terms for the novel prize, to be applied in the 1929 contest, then, read: “For the American novel published during the year, preferably one which shall best present the whole atmosphere of American life.” The Advisory Board had dispensed with the moralism and uplift, but by reintroducing that ambiguous word whole and adding an ambiguity of its own, had further muddied the waters. What was meant by the American novel? And by whole, did the authorities mean that to qualify for a Pulitzer prize a novel had to get all of American life into one novel? Or did whole simply mean that the prize-winning novel might include the sordid as well as the wholesome aspects of American life—whatever these might be?¹³

The following year, evidently in an attempt to clear up the confusion, the authorities announced that they had formulated another new set of requirements for the novel: The Pulitzer prize in 1930 would be given for “the best American novel published during the year, preferably one which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life.”¹⁴ These new conditions, which read like a statement of compromise between literary critics and public moralists, were certainly more precise than the last version. However, by retaining the equivocal adverb “preferably,” the authorities seemed to acknowledge the “best” American novel might not be wholesome, which could hardly have pleased the moralists. And so the next year, 1931, the Pulitzer authorities announced a third set of conditions, which came out unequivocally for excellence as the only official criterion for the fiction prize. The Pulitzer novel prize would now be given “for the best novel” published during the year by an American author.¹⁵

But more changes were to come. So much controversy was stirred up in 1934 when the Pulitzer officials rejected their drama jury's vote for Maxwell Anderson's play, Mary of Scotland—jurors were resigning and denouncing the Pulitzer officials in print and on the radio—that the authorities again altered the terms of the novel as well as the drama awards, giving preference once more to American material. Henceforth, the novel prize would be given “for the best novel published during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”¹⁶

The critics were not silenced, however. One disaffected drama juror, Clayton Hamilton, continued to attack the drama selections and, in 1935, disgruntled New York drama critics founded a rival drama prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.¹⁷ In an obvious attempt to put a stop to such criticism, or to cut the ground from under their critics' feet, Pulitzer authorities in 1936 made a fifth change in the official prize conditions. Instead of claiming to select the “best” novel [play, and so forth] of the year, they would now simply give their prize to “a distinguished novel of the year.”¹⁸ The new terms, of course, amounted to little more than word-juggling. The fact that the Pulitzer officials continued to single out one work from the hundreds produced each year implied (whether they wished to admit it or not), that, for reasons unspecified, the chosen work was thought to be the best one published in that year.

Since 1936 one more alteration has been made in the official terms under which the novel award is made. In 1947 the word “novel” was dropped and the phrase “fiction in book form” was substituted.¹⁹ These are the terms under which the awards have since been made. Considering the many fine collections of short stories that have appeared in this country before 1947—by Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, and many others—this change was long overdue. Regrettably enough, the Pulitzer authorities appear to have been motivated less by a desire to broaden the scope of the award than to accommodate James A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific,²⁰ a poorly written collection of journalistic sketches that could not qualify under the old conditions.

During the early 1920's, when the Pulitzer prize was not well known, officials of Columbia University disseminated information about the prize selection procedure. It was explained that the Pulitzer prizes were awarded as the result of a “national competition” in which writers from all parts of the United States competed. In order to enter a book in the contest, it was said, novelists or their agents (that is, their publishers) had only to submit a letter of nomination and a copy of the book to the Pulitzer authorities. The novels so nominated were then read by a three-man jury of “experts” who met together, nominated the prize-winning work, and passed on their recommendation to the Advisory Board of the School of Journalism. The board, at its annual meeting in May, then voted to accept or reject the recommendations of its juries and passed on its decisions to the trustees of Columbia University for approval and official certification.²¹

Columbia officials said nothing publicly about how the jury reached its verdict, but some jurors did talk about what went on behind the scenes. As a consequence, the jury procedure became public knowledge. After the jury was appointed, each member was provided with a list of the novels that had been formally “nominated” and the process of narrowing the field began. First, the committee eliminated all works thought ineligible, then it read and rejected all but three novels which the jury agreed were the best of the lot. When that list was complete, a final vote was taken. Each juror ranked the candidates in the order of his preference and sent his ballot to the chairman of the jury, who then totaled the results (giving three points for a first place vote, two for a second, and so forth) and forwarded to Columbia the name of the candidate that had received the largest number of points. At its annual meeting in May the Advisory Board then voted on the recommendations of its juries. This nominating procedure was in effect (officially, at least) from 1918 until 1934 when, because of the public dispute with drama jurors, a new system was officially instituted. Beginning in 1934 all literature juries were instructed not to recommend one candidate for the prize, but instead to submit the names of several possible contenders along with the jury's reasons for recommending each one. The final decision was then made by the newspaper publishers and editors who served on the Advisory Board.²²

The role of the Advisory Board in the yearly decisions before the 1950's has never been made entirely clear. Though legally free to do as it chose, the board for many years left the choice of prize-winning books pretty much to the juries, intervening only when asked to do so by President Butler and then merely to follow his instructions.²³ Even after the alteration in 1934 of the nominating procedures, the juries apparently continued to make the final selection by pushing one candidate harder than others, the Advisory Board acting only when a jury could not agree on a top contender. Whether in those instances the board actually read all of the books nominated by the jury, or whether it based its decision on the jury's comments (and Butler's suggestions) is an open question. It did happen occasionally that a board member pushed his own preference which, whether nominated by the jury or not, might end up with the prize, as Tales of the South Pacific did in 1948.²⁴

But whatever role the Advisory Board played from year to year, it was always under the watchful eye of Nicholas Murray Butler, who was the real power behind the scenes. Nothing could be done that Butler did not approve. He had a long-standing, jealous regard for the Pulitzer prizes, particularly for the novel prize, and saw it as a means of attracting national attention to the university. Butler's influence extended from the beginning in 1917 until his retirement in 1942. Though he apparently never worked to get any one candidate the prize (he may, however, have pushed for Ellen Glasgow's In This Our Life in 1942), he saw to it that only the kind of books he approved were finally selected.²⁵ He did this primarily by making certain that only his sort of people were appointed as jurors. In the carly years when juries were filled from the rosters of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (of which Butler was president), and from its affiliate organization, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Butler either made the selection of jurors personally or allowed a trusted underling to do so.²⁶ He also reviewed the jury lists each year in light of recent performances and made decisions about whether a change in personnel was in order—for he was sometimes disappointed in the decisions of his jurors. But if a jury let him down by picking a candidate he did not like, he took his case to the Advisory Board and got what he wanted. Butler's power was such that when the Advisory Board voted, over his strenuous objections, to give For Whom the Bell Tolls the 1941 Pulitzer prize, he threatened to refuse to submit the board's decision to the trustees and the board backed down. No prize was given in 1941.²⁷

After Butler's retirement in 1942, the center of power began to shift. Subsequent presidents of Columbia stayed out of the Pulitzer prize decisions and the Advisory Board began to assert itself. With the retirement of many older members in the 1950's the board was reconstituted and began to take a more active role in the selection of the prize-winners. Whereas formerly it had more or less followed the advice of juries, it gradually developed “consultative committees” which acted as super juries, regularly reading all of the recommendations by the juries and making its own recommendations to the full board.²⁸ If the “jury of experts” disagreed among themselves, the board's own subcommittees made a final decision; or if the board's subcommittee members disliked all of the juries' candidates, it substituted its own candidate or recommended withholding the prize.

From the beginning Columbia made it official policy to keep the names of jurors secret, not only in the months preceding announcement of the winners (when such secrecy would be justified), but for years afterwards as well. In the 1920's, when the prize decisions were beginning to stir controversy, President Butler did offer the assurance that the men who served on the Pulitzer juries were “invariably men of the highest competence and reputation.”²⁹ Later, in 1951, in a letter to the editors of the Saturday Review who had been agitating for the disclosure of jurors' names, Carl W. Ackerman, then Dean of Columbia's Journalism School, asserted that the jurors' names could not be made public but assured his readers that the Pulitzer jurors were all faculty members of prominent universities. This claim was true for 1952, but had not been true during the preceding nine years.³⁰

Other than Butler's vague assurance and Ackerman's misleading letter, the Pulitzer authorities kept quiet about their jurors and since the mid-1920's even kept jurors from talking in public. In the earliest years, however, before the lid was entirely fastened down, there were numerous “leaks.” Jurors, angered at being overruled, spoke out publicly, revealing their own identity and sometimes that of others. Enough names came out in those years so that a reader interested in penetrating the facade of Pulitzer secrecy could put together a fairly accurate roster of the men who served on the seven earliest juries and who thus helped give the Pulitzer novel prize its distinctive character.³¹ In 1974, when the names of all Pulitzer jurors were finally published, readers had confirmed what earlier evidence had clearly suggested: Pulitzer judges—whatever their talents—were not always as Nicholas Murray Butler had portrayed them, “invariably men of the highest competence and reputation.”

Among the jurors who helped establish the Pulitzer fiction prize were Robert Morss Lovett and Stuart Pratt Sherman, academicians with some experience in journalism and book reviewing. Lovett was briefly an editor of the New Republic (1921), a longtime professor of English at the University of Chicago (1904-36), and author of books on Edith Wharton and on the contemporary novel, though he was best known as coeditor of a history of English literature. Stuart Pratt Sherman, probably the best known of the academic jurors, left a professorship at the University of Illinois to become editor of the book section of the New York Herald Tribune in 1924 where he established a reputation as a highbrow interpreter of contemporary literature and an authority on culture. Lovett and Sherman were both committed to the view that the best American fiction should propagandize for social improvement. Lovett's concern, however, was with broad social change, Sherman's with cultural uplift. In 1929, for instance, Lovett voted to give the novel prize to Boston, Upton Sinclair's novel about the Sacco-Vanzetti case because he approved its social message; and in 1920, when the jury (of which Lovett was a member) voted to give the prize to Main Street and were overruled in favor of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Lovett publicly protested. Mrs. Wharton's novel was an exercise in nostalgia, he said, whereas Main Street was a living commentary on the American scene, leading “its readers to purge the small-town atmosphere of certain unwholesome tendencies. …”³² Lovett's defense of Main Street echoed some of the official phraseology of the Pulitzer award and was no doubt designed in part to embarrass Columbia officials who had overruled the jury. But there is little doubt that Main Street appealed to Lovett's critical sense as thoroughly as had the novels of Booth Tarkington, Upton Sinclair, and Margaret Ayer Barnes—all of whom Lovett admired and helped to give Pulitzer prizes.³³

Stuart Pratt Sherman also served on the jury that had picked Main Street for the 1920 award, and though he did not publicly protest being overruled, he subsequently published an essay on Lewis in which he took somewhat the same line of defense Lovett had, except that his interest was less in altering the atmosphere of small-town life than in jolting the average reader into an awareness of his low cultural condition and starting him on the road to self-improvement.³⁴ Sherman's particular point of view is more fully spelled out in an essay in which he explained his theory of cultural salvation. Young men and women would be saved from unhappiness and discontent by service, he said, not service of the old-fashioned sort, such as missionary work in Africa or even in the Y.M.C.A., but the service of work—“all work that is done as it should be done whether of the hands or of the brain.” Such work, Sherman said, “whatever it is,” has “something of the peace and satisfaction of religious devotion.”³⁵

Sherman's theories about service and work are pertinent here because they so closely resemble sentiments expressed in several Pulitzer prize novels, particularly His Family, The Magnificent Ambersons, So Big, and, especially, Alice Adams, which he helped give a Pulitzer prize in 1922. Sherman's theories could also be used to gloss more recent winners such as Arrowsmith, The Store, and even Grapes of Wrath—prizewinners that Sherman had no hand in selecting. Of all the jurors, Stuart Pratt Sherman best epitomizes Pulitzer standards of literary excellence, not only because of his “uplift” theory of fiction and his veneration of the work ethic but also because artistic excellence seemed to have so little place in his critical judgment.

Other jurors who served in the early years and who left their stamp on the Pulitzer novel prize were men distinguished in ways other than by fiction writing or literary criticism. Robert Grant had published novels, but was best known as a judge in the Massachusetts state courts.³⁶ Edwin Lefèvre, an engineer-journalist, wrote cashbox romances in the tradition of Horatio Alger.³⁷ Samuel McCord Crothers was a Unitarian minister whose chief literary distinction appears to have been a volume titled The Gentle Reader, in which he announced that the English novel had reached its highest development with Fielding and Richardson. In that same book Crothers also remarked that “the greatest thing [about the novel] is still action, and we eagerly turn the pages to see what is going to happen next—unless we are reading some of our modern realistic studies of character. … But when we turn to the poets, we are in the land of the lotus-eaters. … The atmosphere is that of a perfect day.”³⁸ Crothers, Lefèvre, and Grant served only briefly—Lefèvre one year, Crothers, three, Grant four.

Like Lovett and Sherman, most of the early jurors were academics, many with some professional interest in contemporary fiction. However, the academic juror with the longest tenure (seventeen years) was Jefferson Butler Fletcher, who taught comparative literature at Columbia University, specializing in the Italian Renaissance.³⁹ Fletcher's chief publications are Religion of Beauty in Women and Platonic Love and a translation of the Divine Comedy for the Home Library. An academic juror with more apparent qualifications as a judge of contemporary fiction was Richard Burton, sometime head of the English Department at the University of Minnesota and lecturer on contemporary fiction at Columbia and the University of Chicago. Burton served for four years as a fiction juror and then resigned when the Advisory Board overruled the jury he had chaired.⁴⁰ Among Burton's literary pronouncements was the assertion that fiction writers of the nineteenth century were too much preoccupied with technique at the the expense of thought and character.⁴¹ He also said that the chief function of American fiction was to teach

the different parts of the land to know each other and so to realize the variety and vastitude of our national life. … The novel, in this thought, is a mighty civilizer, drawing men together as do the wonderful material uses of electricity, and for for the higher purposes of a comprehensive sympathy and love.⁴²

Bliss Perry, professor of American literature at Harvard, also served for four years, and like his colleagues Sherman and Lovett regarded fiction as a vehicle for social propaganda. In his book The American Mind, Perry argued that the period of rugged individualism was over in the United States and that a new era of socialism was dawning. Individualism would not be dispensed with, Perry said, but there would now be a new and proper blending of individualism with fellowship, a mystical union in which

we shall not forget the distinction between “each” and “all,” but “all” will increasingly be placed at the service of “each.” With fellowship based upon individualism, and with individualism ever leading to fellowship, America will perform its vital tasks and its literature will be the unconscious and beautiful utterance of its inner life.⁴³

What that inner life might consist of is suggested by Bliss Perry's remark in another context that, to be genuinely American, a novel or poem had to reflect what Perry said were the typical qualities of the American people: democratic, optimistic, idealistic, and “fundamentally wholesome.” On the basis of these alleged national characteristics, Perry disparaged the achievement of Emily Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne, and praised Longfellow, Whittier, James Whitcomb Riley, Winston Churchill, and Sam Walter Foss, who wanted “to live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.”⁴⁴ For Perry, the novelist par excellence of democratic America was Fenimore Cooper, “who cared nothing and knew nothing about conscious literary art; his style is diffuse, his syntax the despair of school teachers, and many of his characters are bores.”⁴⁵ Perry's description of what he took to be Cooper's virtues might be applied to a good many Pulitzer novels, though one would not wish to call them virtues.

Another Pulitzer juror much more widely known than Perry was Professor William Lyon Phelps, fondly known to many Yale undergraduates as Billy Phelps, an indefatigable writer, lecturer, and public moralist, who once brought the boxer Gene Tunny to his class to lecture on Shakespeare.⁴⁶ In one of his essays Phelps expressed the opinion that Bob, Son of Battle was the best English novel published between Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Joseph Vance (1906).⁴⁷ He served on the drama and poetry juries as well as on the novel jury and doubtless represented exactly that blend of moralism and literary boosterism that most satisfied Nicholas Murray Butler. Phelps helped select the first four Pulitzer prize novels before moving on to another jury.

Bliss Perry served on two fiction juries, Sherman on three; Lovett and Fletcher, however, continued to serve up to the beginning of World War II. Fletcher was chairman of the novel jury from 1930 through 1937, years when Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner were eligible with some of their finest work. Fletcher continued to serve as a member of the novel jury through 1942, a year when the committee was composed entirely of Columbia faculty members.⁴⁸ In the following year, 1943, after Butler's retirement and the ascension to power of Carl W. Ackerman, dean of the Journalism School, the makeup of the novel jury changed significantly. Whereas early juries had been filled largely with academics (some with Columbia connections), juries from 1943 on were composed largely of journalists.⁴⁹ Except for a three-year period (1952-54) when academics were again in the majority, journalists have usually dominated the fiction juries. Even more significant than this shift from academic to journalistic influence, however, is the astonishing absence from Pulitzer juries of professional novelists. In the fifty-seven years from 1917 to 1974 (out of a total of 155 jurors) only five professional novelists served on the Pulitzer novel juries,⁵⁰ a lack which may in part explain the choice of so many amateurish books and the absence from the Pulitzer prize list of most of our best novels and short-story collections.

The history of the Pulitzer prize novels, however, is not merely a history of omissions nor of books plucked hastily from best-seller lists. Juries deliberated and recommended, the Advisory Board confirmed or overruled or made its own decisions, and during his long tenure Nicholas Murray Butler monitored the results and sometimes had them altered. The outcome of this elaborate procedure—complicated by changes in jury membership, the vicissitudes of publishing, fluctuating reputations, and shifts in public taste—constitutes, nonetheless, a fairly substantial body of fiction that, except for notable exceptions, is surprisingly consistent in quality and in point of view.

Notes

1. Don C. Seitz, Joseph Pulitzer: His Life and Letters (New York, 1924).

2. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism (New York, 1941), 430-45.

3. Ibid., 434.

4. Seitz, Joseph Pulitzer, 447.

5. Joseph Pulitzer, “The College of Journalism,” N. Amer. Rev., Vol. XLXXVIII (May, 1904), 641-80.

6. Seitz, Joseph Pulitzer, 436.

7. Ibid., 445.

8. Ibid., 445-48.

9. For the terms of the other prizes in letters see Appendix A. The poetry prize, added in 1921, also specified only excellence as the criterion for a Pulitzer prize. See John Hohenberg, The Pulitzer Prizes (New York, 1974), 18-20, 68-69; Wyman Barrett, Joseph Pulitzer and His World, 263; and Seitz, Joseph Pulitzer, 463-64.

10. Hohenberg, pp. 55-57.

11. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” The House of Fiction, ed. by Leon Edel (London, 1959), 42.

12. Barrett, Joseph Pulitzer and His World, 264.

13. Robert Morss Lovett, “Pulitzer Prize,” New Republic, Vol. LX (Sept. 11, 1929), 100-101; New York Times, May 13, 1930, p. 1; Hohenberg, The Pulitzer Prizes, 56-57, 88-89.

14. New York Times, May 14, 1929, p. 14.

15. Ibid., Nov., 18, 1931, p. 25.

16. Ibid., May 12, 1934, p. 27.

17. Clayton Hamilton, “Poor Pulitzer Prize,” Amer. Mercury, Vol. XXV (May, 1935), 25-32; New York Times, May 7, 1935, p. 21, and May 5, 1936, p. 18.

18. New York Times, May 7, 1936, p. 21.

19. Ibid., May 11, 1947, p. 45.

20. See Chap. VII below.

21. New York Times, Nov. 27, 1921, p. 3.

22. Hamilton, “Poor Pulitzer Prize,” Amer. Mercury, Vol. XXV (May, 1935), 25-32; Robert Morss Lovett, “Pulitzer Prize,” New Republic, Vol. XXVII (June 22, 1921), 114; and New York Times, May 12, 1934, p. 17.

23. Hohenberg's semi-official history, The Pulitzer Prizes, makes numerous references to the role of the Advisory Board, but the full story of what went on behind the scenes has yet to be told.

24. See pp. 138-39 below. In addition to Tales of the South Pacific (1948), the Advisory Board also selected For Whom the Bell Tolls, In This Our Life (1943), The Town (1951), The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (1949), A Death in the Family (1958), and Advise and Consent (1960). Hohenberg, pp. 146-47, 200-203, 256-60.

25. See Hohenberg, pp. 146-47. Butler may also have been responsible for the 1921 prize being taken from Main Street and given to The Age of Innocence. See pp. 39-42 below.

26. F. D. Fackenthal was Butler's chief liaison with the juries. See Hohenberg, p. 26.

27. See pp. 122-23 below.

28. Hohenberg, pp. 229-31, 235, 255.

29. New York Times, March 30, 1925, p. 5.

30. Saturday Review, Vol. XXXIV (July 14, 1951), 26. See Appendix C for a list of the jurors for those years.

31. See W. J. Stuckey, Pulitzer Prize Novels: A Critical Backward Look, 1st ed. (Norman, 1965), 16-25. Newspapers at the time reported that Sinclair Lewis was a fiction juror in 1936, a report that has since proved false. See Hohenberg, p. 93.

32. “Pulitzer Prize,” New Republic, Vol. XXVII (June 22, 1921), 114, and pp. 40-42 below.

33. Lovett lavishly praised The Magnificent Ambersons in a review in Dial (Book Review Digest, 1918, p. 431). In Preface to Fiction (p. 83), he mentioned Years of Grace, which he had helped select for a Pulitzer prize, as an American example of the genealogical novel. He had also said that since the novel is “essentially popular,” it “should demand of the layman no deeply specialized knowledge.” (p. 10).

34. The Significance of Sinclair Lewis (New York, 1922).

35. The Genius of America: Studies in Behalf of the Younger Generation (New York, 1923), 171-95.

36. Among Grant's books are Jack Hall (Boston, 1888); Jack in the Bush (New York, 1893); The Reflections of a Married Man (New York, 1892); The Opinions of a Philosopher (New York, 1893); Unleavened Bread (New York, 1900), a novel about Selma, a social climber from the Middle West, which Hamlin Garland characterized as a “good book with sociological significance … true and broadminded,” in My Friendly Contemporaries (New York, 1932), 363; The High Priestess (New York, 1915); Occasional Verses, 1873-1923 (Boston, 1926).

37. According to Who Was Who in America, 1943-1950 (II, 317), Lefèvre studied engineering at Lehigh University, was “in Journalism.” His publications include Wall Street Stories (New York, 1901); H. R. (New York and London, 1915); The Plunderers (New York, 1916); To the Last Penny (New York and London, 1917); Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (New York, 1923).

38. Pages 46-47.

39. Fletcher served from 1922 through 1925 and from 1927 through 1942.

40. For a fuller account of the incident see p. 80 below. According to Hohenberg, The Pulitzer Prizes, p. 89, Burton asked to be relieved because his lectures on contemporary fiction subjected his public statements to misrepresentation. Burton (who also served on the jury that gave the 1927 prize to Louis Bromfield for Early Autumn) was at one time managing editor of The Churchman, literary editor of the Hartford Courant, head of the English department of the University of Minnesota (1898-1902, 1906-25), and lecturer on literature at Columbia (1921-33). He also served on Pulitzer juries in drama, poetry, and biography from 1920 to 1940. Among his published works are Literary Leaders of America (New York, 1903), lectures for the Chautauqua Society, and Forces in Fiction and Other Essays (Indianapolis, 1902).

41. Literary Leaders of America, 202.

42. Ibid., 314.

43. Pages 248-49.

44. The American Mind, p. 245.

45. A Study of Prose Fiction (New York, 1902), 235-60. Other publications by Perry include Walt Whitman: His Life and Work (Boston and New York, 1906); The American Spirit in Literature (New Haven, 1918); A Study of Poetry (Boston and New York, 1920); Emerson Today (Princeton, 1931); And Gladly Teach (Boston and New York, 1935).

46. Autobiography with Letters (New York, 1939), 793-94.

47. Essays on Modern Novelists (New York, 1910), 171. Phelps, who was Lampson Professor of English at Yale for thirty-two years, had a national reputation as a genial, morally upright intellectual with the common touch. Among his more than two dozen published books are The Advance of the English Novel (New York, 1916); The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1918); Essays on Modern Dramatists (New York, 1921); Human Nature in the Bible (New York, 1922), Happiness (New York, 1927); What I like in Poetry (New York, 1934).

48. The other two Columbia faculty members were Joseph Wood Krutch and Gilbert Highet.

49. See Appendix C.

50. These include Hamlin Garland, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Elizabeth Janeway, Jean Stafford, and Elizabeth Hardwick. Sinclair Lewis was erroneously reported as a member of the 1936 jury that chose Honey in the Horn by H. L. Davis. New York Times, May 5, 1936, p. 18, and Hohenberg, p. 93.