Press: Pulitzer Prizes

When last year’s Pulitzer Prizes were announced, the news amounted to little more than confirmation of what Gossiper Walter Winchell had already told the world. Determined to safeguard every breath of thunder, the Columbia University Trustees this year canceled the customary advance releases to the Press, kept the winners’ names secret for the formal announcement last week at a Manhattan banquet.

To Arthur Krock, able chief of the New York Times’s Washington staff, went the $500 award for distinguished Correspondence. A newsman for 29 of his 48 years, bespectacled Arthur Krock first covered Washington for the late great “Marse Henry” Watterson, whose Louisville Courier-Journal he later edited. In 1923 he joined the New York World’s distinguished staff of editorial writers, thence to the Times. Four years ago he reluctantly returned to Washington, which he disliked, to succeed the late Richard V. Oulahan as Times chief of staff. Remaining severely on the sidelines, immune to official blandishments, Arthur Krock viewed the Capital scene with careful detachment, reported it accurately, interpreted it colorfully. He still considers Washington as “Death Valley for newspapermen.”

Best Reporting of the year, the judges found, was done by a youthful sports writer on the New York Herald Tribune, William Howland Taylor. To him went $1,000 for his stories of the America’s Cup Races: the claim of foul by the British yacht Endeavour, the victory won by Harold Vanderbilt’s Rainbow. A yachtsman, William Taylor helped organize the Frostbite Yacht Club which sails dinghies ia winter.

Public Service by a newspaper was best rendered by the Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, whose Associate Editor Arthur B. Waugh investigated the nominations by President Roosevelt of Nevada’s Federal Judge Frank H. Norcross to the Circuit Court of Appeals, and of Lawyer William Woodburn to succeed Norcross. By linking both men with the George Wingfield political machine, the Bee thwarted the nominations.

Cartoon of the year ($500) was by Ross A. Lewis in the Milwaukee Journal. It showed a huge brute labeled “Violence” straddling the fence between a factory and a mob of strikers. Caption: “Sure, I’ll Work for Both Sides.” Editorial of the year: none.

Letters. ($1,000 each.) Best novel, Now in November, by Josephine Winslow Johnson (TiME, Sept. 24).

Best play, The Old Maid, by Zoe Akins, (TIME, Jan. 21).

Best U. S. history, The Colonial Period of American History, by Charles McLean Andrews.

Best U. S. biography, R. E. Lee, by Douglas Southall Freeman (TIME, Feb. 11).

Best verse, Bright Ambush, by Audrey Wurdemann.