Pulitzer Prize Winners: Have You Read Any?

So, this recent post included the question: Who are the latest three Pulitzer winners for fiction? And of course I had no idea and not a lot of interest, but some of you looked up the winners and commented, and suddenly I got more interested. This is partly because I LOVED The Killer Angels, which I hadn’t realized won the Pulitzer. I was so surprised to see it mentioned that I wasn’t sure it was the same book until I checked. It is. It’s an amazingly good book about three days in the Civil War. The movie based on this book, Gettysburg, was also excellent.

So I thought, fine, let’s see what else has won the Pulitzer. Here’s a Wikipedia page that lists the winners in chronological order. Besides The Killer Angels, I have read:

The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, which I liked a lot and admired. I’ve read a few others by Pearl Buck (Peony and The Townsman), and I have to agree with the Pulitzer judges that she was an amazing writer. Gosh, she wrote a ton of novels! A lot more than I realized. I’ve got Pavilion of Women on my TBR pile. . Death in the Castle is just $1.99 at Amazon right now. So is Letters from Peking.

The Old Man and the Sea, by Hemingway, which was assigned in high school and which I didn’t hate as much as all the other books that were assigned in high school. I didn’t know it had won the Pulitzer! It’s really short, under 30,000 words! It’s a novella, and not even a long novella! I’m surprised the Pulitzer considers works that short, though I’m also realizing now that “Fiction” doesn’t specify novel and for all I know the judges have awarded the Pulitzer to short stories. Oh, yes, I see a collection of short stories by Jean Stafford is on this list.

To Kill a Mockingbird, which was also assigned in high school, and which I did not like and don’t remember well.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I read voluntarily and … sort of liked. It is almost but not quite unrelentingly grim. Also, it makes no sense. I mean, the setting makes no sense. It’s post-apocalyptic, but … it doesn’t make any sense! Everything living has died except a tiny number of humans making their way through this exceedingly bleak landscape, and what caused this catastrophe and how this many people are still alive and how they’re staying alive given there’s nothing whatsoever left anywhere, all this is totally unclear. I guess drawing a rational setting was not McCarthy’s aim. Also, this is the author who thinks punctuation is passe and doesn’t use anything except, occasionally, periods.

That’s it for me. I’m not going to rush out and read anything else here either, although, I mean, if anybody here pointed emphatically to something on the list, I would at least add a sample to my TBR pile and who knows, maybe I would read it.

Meanwhile! Did you know that the judges withheld an award in 2012? I didn’t know that. The judges cited lack of quality, which is quite an insult to the panel that selects the nominees, I must say — though the Pulitzer has been withheld a total of 12 times, so it’s not super unusual. The link goes to a post written by one of the people who selected the nominees. Here is how a thirty-second google search says it works: There’s a 20-person panel, from which three people are selected to choose three books to nominate. These three nominees are then referred back to the panel, and the remaining 17 (or so, apparently) people then act as judges to select the Pulitzer winner for that year. If some details here are wrong, sorry, you can do your own much more careful google search and find out how it really works.

Anyway, from the linked post:

The nominees were David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, which was not only unfinished at the time of Wallace’s death but left in disarray, and brilliantly pieced together by Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch; Denis Johnson’s grim but transcendent Train Dreams, set in the American West at the turn of the nineteenth century; and an accomplished first novel, Swamplandia!, about an eccentric Southern family, by the alarmingly young writer Karen Russell.

I’m sure you want to know how old Karen Russel was at the time. She was twenty-nine. I admit that this does seem young to me, but not shockingly young.

Three hundred books were under consideration. There’s no hint of how those three hundred were chosen, but I assume SFF novels are never considered except when critics are pretending it’s not SF, as with Butler’s Kindred, for example. Or The Road, for that matter. Ditto for other quote commercial fiction unquote.

But, back to the nominees that were dismissed by the panel in 2012. Once again from the linked post:

I was, as it happened, the first of us to read “The Pale King,” and well before I’d finished it I found myself calling Maureen and Susan and saying, “The first paragraph of the Wallace book is more powerful than any entire book we’ve read so far.”

Consider its opening line:

Past the flannel plains and the blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscatine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

Here’s a line from Train Dreams:

All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dreamlike business he’d ever witnessed waking—the brilliant pastels of the last light overhead, some clouds high and white, catching daylight from beyond the valley, others ribbed and gray and pink, the lowest of them rubbing the peaks of Bussard and Queen mountains; and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utter still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world.

And from Swamplandia:

Nights in the swamp were dark and star-lepered—our island was thirty-odd miles from the mainland—and although your naked eye could easily find the ball of Venus and the sapphire hairs of the Pleiades, our mother’s body was just lines, a smudge against the palm trees.

To which my response is, “star-lepered”? Anyway, I do like the first two, though I’ve no intention of rushing out and reading either. The panel of judges never really laid out why they didn’t award the prize to any of these three OR ask for a fourth nominee, which they could have done. Why didn’t they? I hereby declare they were jerks, not for failing to pick a winner, but for failing to request a fourth nominee and then not picking a winner. I can’t offhand imagine any non-jerk motive for that.

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