Books: Winners

In Manhattan last fortnight, soft-voiced, grey-haired Elizabeth Seifert, winner of the $10,000 Dodd, Mead-Redbook Magazine novel contest, attended a big luncheon in her honor at which Hendrik Van Loon, Pearl Buck and other literary notables spoke, hurried back to her home town of Moberly, Mo. to start work on another novel. The wife of a refrigeration engineer (her real name is Mrs. John Gasparotti), Prize-winner Seifert won over 1,200 contestants with Young Doctor Galahad, a story of a small-town physician, planned to use her winnings to educate her four children. For herself she bought a hat, a dress, a pair of shoes, a new typewriter. Said Moberly’s mayor: “It’s the biggest thing that has happened to this town since the mine disaster” (1936).

One of the most literate of U. S. women’s clubs, Chicago’s Friends of American Writers, gives an annual award to a Midwestern writer for work showing “originality of technique and value as a piece of Americana.” Prizewinners in the past have included Carl Sandburg, Harriet Monroe, Vincent Sheean, some 16 other Midwesterners. Professional literary critics have no say in Friends of American Writers’ selections. For its 1937 award of $1.000, the club’s committee of 21 considered but passed over books by Ernest Hemingway, Dorothea Brande, Louis Bromfield, chose 30-year-old William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows (TIME, May 3).