The Missing Pulitzer

Writing in the Washington Post, Professor Maureen Corrigan, one of the three jurors who selected the Pulitzer finalists, lamented the lack of a prize this year. She feels the fault lies in the system, in which the Pulitzer board has the final say instead of the highly qualified judges. She believes the decision should be made by experts in the field, not the inexpert board of directors.

She also said that nothing disqualified the entries. Too short? The Old Man and the Sea was 90 pages, and The Great Gatsby not much longer.

I am uneasy with all this, perhaps because I am a literary democrat, feeling deeply that literature should be accessible to all. John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and to a lesser extent F. Scott Fitzgerald, were all committed to the idea that American fiction should be accessible to Everyman, and not the province of elitists.

I love fiction that is transparent, swiftly grasped, and can be enjoyed by anyone, wrought from words and ideas that run deep in the social fabric. I believe that such fiction can be even more elegant and gracious than the sort of literary fiction much favored by academics, which is not accessible and requires a lot of schooling to appreciate.

I rejoice in a fiction that is open to all, and for that reason I am uneasy with Professor Corrigan's wish to leave it to the experts to decide what is good literature.