The Press: Not Enough Merit

Although journalists get most of the Pulitzers, awards are also made in the field of arts and letters. But on this far larger hunting ground, the judges have had chronic trouble finding, or at least recognizing, enough merit to cover all seven divisions.* The fiction prize has been skipped seven times in 48 years, the drama award eight times. This year the Pulitzer jurors withheld awards in music, drama and fiction.

Under those headings, the jurors sent not a single nomination to the University of Columbia board of trustees, which picks the winners. Some of the other arts-and-letters awards, though, testified to a painstaking search for merit. The history award went to Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town, a book that was rejected by two publishers before Author Sumner Chilton Powell found a printer. Powell fielded his prize with special gratitude. He hoped, he said, that it might help him on his newest project: finding a suitable job.

Author Powell’s publisher, the Wesleyan University Press in Middletown, Conn., was not far behind him in gratitude. Although the university got into book publishing only seven years ago, it published another of this year’s winners: At the End of the Open Road, a volume of verse by Louis Simpson.

* Music, fiction, drama, history, biography, poetry, and something the Pulitzer committee calls “general nonfiction.”