Prizes: Loser Take All

If Columbia University keeps plugging, it may soon make the Pulitzer Prizes more valuable in the losing than the winning. Last year, after the Pulitzer Advisory Board unanimously chose W. A. Swanberg’s Citizen Hearst for the $500 biography award, Columbia’s trustees vetoed the book—and sales spurted. Last week, after a two-man screening jury recommended Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for the drama award, the Advisory Board decided to omit the prize. But with a New York Drama Critics Award and five Tonys (Broadway’s Oscars) already on its mantel, Virginia probably got a bigger box-office boost by losing than by joining the 16 prizewinners. Bed & Booze. The jurors, though, were loudly upset. “Farce,” cried Critic John Mason Brown. “We’ve had enough,” said Yale Drama Professor J. W. Gassner, who recalled that when he and Brown recommended Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic in 1960, it was jettisoned for the musical Fiorello! Both jurors quit. Apparently, the play’s preoccupation with bed and booze proved too much for some of the 14 Advisory Board members. “I thought it was a filthy play,” said Chicago Tribune Editor William D. Maxwell, who spends part of his time back home scrubbing books “by dirty-fingered authors” from the Trib’s weekly bestseller list. Washington Star Vice President Benjamin McKelway confessed that he rejected the play without having seen it. Safe & Solid. Otherwise, the awards were what many a commentator termed “safe and solid”—and about as controversial as a seed catalogue. Posthumous prizes went to Physician-Poet William Carlos Williams for Pictures from Brueghel and to Novelist William Faulkner for The Reivers (his second Pulitzer). Other second-time winners: Composer Samuel Barber for Piano Concerto No. 1, and New York Timesman Anthony Lewis, winner of the $1,000 national reporting prize for his Supreme Court coverage. The rest of the winners: History: Constance McLaughlin Green’s Washington, Village and Capital, 1800-1878; Biography: Leon Edel’s two-volume continuation of his life of Henry James, The Conquest of London and The Middle Years; General nonfiction: Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August; News photography: Hector Rondon of La Republica, Caracas; Cartoon: Frank Miller of the Des Moines Register; Editorial writing: Ira B. Harkey Jr. of the Pascagoula, Miss., Chronicle; Local reporting not under deadline: Oscar O. Griffin Jr. of the Pecos, Texas, Independent and Enterprise; Local reporting under deadline: Sylvan Fox, Anthony Shannon and William Longgood of the New York World-Telegram and Sun; International reporting: Hal Hendrix of the Miami News; Public service: the Chicago Daily News.