Edith Wharton and the Pulitzer Prize

In my haste to publish my last article, I forgot that I had wanted to mention some things about the Pulitzer Prize, which was awarded in 1920 to The Age of Innocence. As with other artistic awards, the Pulitzer Prize in the non-journalism categories has almost always been played down by the better writers themselves, and, taking the cue from them, in our days this damping of enthusiasm has spread to much of the reading public. In prestige it is my sense that it has been surpassed by the National Book Award, which looks over time to have a better track record, at least for picking things that later critics and writers have favored; still, the advantage is slight, and it is not something that serious people allow themselves to get overexcited about. The Pulitzer still carried some middlebrow cache in the 60s however--my encyclopedia list duly notes when one of its selections was thus honored, and they did choose 13 fiction winners and 9 drama winners from the 1920-1955 era for inclusion. In 1920 the fiction prize was being given for just the 3rd time, but evidently it was a big enough deal that many of the big writers of the time were aware of it and considered it worth noticing--Pulitzer himself of course had been a titan in the business of the printed word, which meant nothing to purer literary spirits like Ezra Pound, but any kind of prize bearing his name would likely have piqued a certain amount of interest in anyone who wrote at least in part with an eye towards getting or maintaining an upper middle class income.

The point of all this being that according to the chronology of Edith Wharton's life given in the Library of America, the Pulitzer committee actually chose Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (which also appears on this reading list later on--1920 was an exciting year for books in America) as the winner, but the trustees of Columbia University, to which Pulitzer had left the money for and administration of the prizes (and which still administers them, by the way), rejected that selection as too controversial and awarded the prize to Wharton, who, it is said, was appalled by this cowardice and began a correspondence with Lewis which continued for many years afterwards. Wharton was evidently not so appalled that she refused the prize, as Lewis himself would do in 1925 after winning for Arrowsmith (he appears to be the only one who has done so however, for fiction anyway; I had thought it was a more regular occurrence. On the other hand there have been three posthumous winners). Perhaps she was not aware she could do so.

All this information is really nothing to the point, but I had wanted to mention it. It tells us nothing about the meaning of the book. I usually know nothing about the meanings of books, though in this particular instance I think I have slightly more of a grasp on it than usual, because its main themes resemble impulses and feelings that most people living in any kind of conventionally structured society will have. But I would have trouble disconnecting what I think is going on in the book from my personal feelings and experience, and I don't want to go into that on a blog at this time.