Challenge: Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (up until 1947 known as the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel) is one of the most distinguished prizes in the U.S. It is awarded annually fordistinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.

The aim of this challenge is continue progressing through the annuls of Pulitzer history until I have read as many as possible.

Those books I've read are in Orange and those I've reviewed linked through. 

Currently read: 8

1917: no award given

1918: His Family - Ernest Poole

1919: The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington

1920: no award given

1921: The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

1922: Alice Adams - Booth Tarkington

1923: One of Ours - by Willa Cather

1924: The Able McLaughlins - by Margaret Wilson

1925: So Big - by Edna Ferber

1926: Arrowsmith - by Sinclair Lewis (declined prize)

1927: Early Autumn - Louis Bromfield

1928: The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder

1929: Scarlet Sister Mary - Julia Peterkin

1930: Laughing Boy - Oliver La Farge

1931: Years of Grace - Margaret Ayer Barnes

1932: The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck

1933: The Store - Thomas Sigismund Stribling

1934: Lamb in His Bosom - Caroline Miller

1935: Now in November - Josephine Winslow Johnson

1936: Honey in the Horn - Harold L. Davis

1937: Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

1938: The Late George Apley - John Phillips Marquand

1939: The Yearling - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

1940: The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

1941: no award given

1942: In This Our Life - Ellen Glasgow

1943: Dragon's Teeth - Upton Sinclair

1944: Journey in the Dark - Martin Flavin

1945: A Bell for Adano - John Hersey

1946: no award given

1947: All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

1948: Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener

1949: Guard of Honor - James Gould Cozzens

1950: The Way West - A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

1951: The Town - Conrad Richter

1952: The Caine Mutiny - Herman Wouk

1953: The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

1954: No award given

1955: A Fable - William Faulkner

1956: Andersonville - MacKinlay Kantor

1957: No award given

1958: A Death in the Family - James Agee

1959: The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters - Robert Lewis Taylor

1960: Advise and Consent - Allen Drury

1961: To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

1962: The Edge of Sadness - Edwin O'Connor

1963: The Reivers - William Faulkner

1964: No award given

1965: The Keepers of the House - Shirley Ann Grau

1966: The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter - Katherine Anne Porter

1967: The Fixer - Bernard Malamud

1968: The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron

1969: House Made of Dawn - N. Scott Momaday

1970: The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford - Jean Stafford

1971: No award given

1972: Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner

1973: The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty

1974: No award given

1975: The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara

1976: Humboldt's Gift - Saul Bellow

1977: No award given

1978: Elbow Room - James Alan McPherson

1979: The Stories of John Cheever - John Cheever

1980: The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer

1981: A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

1982: Rabbit Is Rich - John Updike

1983: The Color Purple - Alice Walker

1984: Ironweed - William Kennedy

1985: Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie

1986: Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry

1987: A Summons to Memphis - Peter Taylor

1988: Beloved - Toni Morrison

1989: Breathing Lessons - Anne Tyler

1990: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love - Oscar Hijuelos

1991: Rabbit At Rest - John Updike

1992: A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley

1993: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - Robert Olen Butler

1994: The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx

1995: The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields

1996: Independence Day - Richard Ford

1997: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer - Steven Millhauser

1998: American Pastoral - Philip Roth

1999: The Hours - Michael Cunningham

2000: Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

2001: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon

2002: Empire Falls - Richard Russo

2003: Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

2004: The Known World - Edward P. Jones

2005: Gilead - Marilynne Robinson

2006: March - Geraldine Brooks

2007: The Road - Cormac McCarthy

2008: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz

2009: Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

If Mrs Dalloway were a diamond it would be almost as big as the Ritz, priceless, and kept under lock and key in a national museum. Visitors would gape at it, experts celebrate it, soothsayers develop all sorts of legends around it. Most of all it would inspire awe in those who looked upon it, for no one could quite conceive of the gargantuan forces needed to bring about its creation. And yet, for all this immense beauty it would remain shut up in its case, impractical, and with grains of carbon imperfection at its core.

What Michael Cunningham does in The Hours is akin to the master jeweller who takes this unwieldy diamond and from it creates a series of smaller, perfectly crafted gems which sparkle in the light and can be placed within rings and pendants and worn in public for all to enjoy. His skill is in knowing exactly where to cut and where to shave so that none of the original beauty is lost. The result is a precious reworking of a great novel, simplified, purified, and with an engaging plot which augments, comments upon, and replies to the themes of Woolf’s original text.

The story unfolds through the interweaving narratives of three women whose lives are linked by and constantly refer back to Mrs Dalloway. It is the 1920s and having been forced to retreat from literary London after a breakdown, Mrs Woolf is tentatively beginning to write her new novel. Occasionally she catches a glimpse of inspiration, but fears it will fade like a dream the moment she wakes up. It is the 1940s and Mrs Brown is pregnant with her second child, savouring a few extra minutes in bed with her book before she has to go downstairs and play the role of wife and mother. And it is the end of the twentieth century and Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her New York apartment to buy flowers for the party she is throwing in honour of her friend Richard Brown, a celebrated poet who is dying of aids.

It is all of these three times at once, for life, like great literature, is timeless. The characters experience similar hopes and fears, similar passions and constraints, and, just occasionally, those moments of exquisite happiness which makes each of these books such a rare treat. What changes is the world around them: the material freedoms of different ages and the social mores which govern what one can and can’t be. As in Mrs Dalloway, the focus is on the beauty and wonder of individual moments, but more fundamentally than its predecessor, The Hours is about their transience, the irrevocable march of time which ensures that everything will ultimately fade and decay. On top of this Cunningham takes many of the sub-plots from Mrs Dalloway – privilege, parenting, homosexuality and mental illness – and looks at them through the lenses of different decades. What is impossible, almost unthinkable, in Virginia Woolf’s 1920s and hidden behind suburban façades in the 1940s is gloriously possible in the 1990s. This is most clearly the case when it comes to homosexuality. In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa cherishes one moment in her life above all else, the kiss she shared with her friend Sally Seton. Here the inspiration for this passage comes from Woolf’s own life, and a simple sisterly kiss shared with her sister. This moment is developed through Mrs Brown stolen moment of solidarity with a sick neighbour, and then fully achieved in the New York of the 1990s, where instead of marrying Richard Dalloway, Clarissa is living happily with Sally.

“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book…What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”

The Hours is packed with these sorts of triptych moments, where biographical fact and classic fiction blur together to create something new. Special moments from Mrs Dalloway are revisited and updated; reflected upon in an atmosphere of nostalgic illumination which only serves to heighten their poignancy. By portraying Virginia Woolf, meticulously researched and brought to life, Cunningham is able to add to the mix an investigation on the nature of writing. Through his elegant, haunting prose, he explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader. While Mrs Woolf is shocked to discover that she can still think clearly and write capably, Mrs Brown is overwhelmed by the clarity of her expression and ascribes almost mythical significance to her words. And while Richard Brown is preparing to be honoured as one of the greatest living poets, he muses repeatedly on the impossibility of it all:

“What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something live and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.”

These moments of heartbreaking honesty are what make The Hours such a great read. For all the beauty of Woolf’s prose, it remains an acquired – and even then challenging – taste. Not so Michael Cunningham. He has a clarity of expression which is dreamy, emotive, and a joy to read. Where Mrs Dalloway is hard work, dense and over punctuated, The Hours is understated and with a beautifully lilting flow. What Michael Cunningham understands is that spectacular prose cannot be overdone. For a passage to shine with its full power it cannot be crowded with dense prose on all sides. Great art is about knowing where to stop – not layering the paint too thick, repeating the motif too often, or attacking the notes with too much bravado – and letting what is already created speak for itself. The Hours may owe its most powerful passages and images to Virginia Woolf’s literary genius, but in taking them out of the Mrs Dalloway context and making them the centrepiece of all which takes place, they become even more beautiful to the eye, like a single flower blossoming in the middle of a lawn.

It is impossible to say which I prefer: the elegant and rewarding Mrs Dalloway which can be peered at in awe through a microscope for hours on end, or The Hours, masterly crafted and perfectly paced. It all comes down to personal preference and I cannot recommend them each highly enough. Ultimately they are each better for the existence of the other. Each captures the beauty in individual moments and the fragility of time. There is one moment near the end of The Hours which sums it all up and captures perfectly that very human experience which they are each about.

“Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties;…we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep – it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.”

9 out of 10

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz

Read: February 2008

Oscar is a fat, Sci-Fi fanatic, Dominican immigrant living in New Jersey. Spends his days writing epic space opera novels, playing RPG’s, and reading comic books. Couldn’t get a girlfriend if his life depended upon it. And Oscar is a hapless romantic, a “passionate enamorao who [falls] in love easily and deeply.” And repeatedly. Unrequitedly.

And when you are born a fat nerd into a Dominican immigrant family whose community image basis itself on “Atomic Level G” pulling powers, a macho culture where sex is a status symbol, it all combines to make life rather difficult. "You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of colour in a contemporary US ghetto."

Then one night at college Oscar goes to a party dressed as Doctor Who. Oh dear Oscar. He looks like a “fat homo Oscar Wilde” – Wilde pronounced in a Dominican accent becomes Wao and a nickname is born. “And the tragedy? After a couple of weeks dude started answering to it.” Dude had his own superhero identity, just without the powers. Or the respect. Or the women.

And when you have all these problems the last thing you need is a family curse looming over you. But such is the family lot. Ever since Oscar’s grandfather made a drunken joke about the Domincan dictator Trujillo, the family have careered from catastrophe to catastrophe. They are burdened with a first rate fukú – “It is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since” – and it shows no sign of skipping a generation. With occasional appearances from a golden eyed mongoose and a man with no face, the Cabral family, and Oscar in particular, fight against the fukú with all their might, try to pretend it doesn’t exist, that their fate is not already determined. But it is all to no avail. “No matter what you believe, fukú believes in you.” And now it has its grips on Oscar and it seems that there is nothing he can do to get his life back.

So while the narrative travels back into the family history of the Cabral’s, two questions hang over poor, lovable Oscar Wao: how will his brief wondrous life come to an end? And will he will ever fulfil his hearts desire and finally get his end away?

In a family epic to end all family epics, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao traces the Cabral family through the ages. From Oscar and his loving runaway sister Lola, through their beautiful, wasted mother Beli and their grandfather, Abelard, who brought the fukú of Trujillo upon the family. It is a tale which encompasses both the turbulent history of the Dominican Republic, and the experience of the immigrant Diaspora. In the epigraph Diaz quotes Derek Walcott on the experience of immigration: “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” And this is perhaps the crux of the book. Through the Cabral’s we tour a distilled version of Dominican history over the past 50 years: from the draconian dictatorship of ‘El Jeffe’ Trujillo – “Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor” – to the everyday of its people. The Cabral’s are nobody’s, emigrants from their homeland, seekers of the better life abroad. But they are also representative of the nation, perhaps, in their struggles and joys, their adventures and outlooks, there diaspora. For this is, above all else, about the immigrant experience. About the insidiousness of the ‘other,’ the experience of being different.

Junot Diaz’s use of polyglot language is fantastic. He combines as much Dominican slang and dialect as you could possibly fit into an English language novel with the sort of sci-fi references usually reserved for Games Workshop on a Saturday afternoon. It is an immigrant nerd novel set amid a macho Latino community whose love of sex is so completely unfulfilled in its hero. Rarely do you read a novel and know you will not read another like it this year. Already voted by Time Magazine and the New York Magazine as the best book of 2007 it has been greeted with the same rapturous praise this side of the Atlantic. And you can see why. The prose is faultless: fast paced, insightful, concise, and with a touch of the wondrous to boot. Junot Diaz unquestionably has a very bright future.

Eleven years in the writing, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is worth the wait. It is both a mature and well planned novel and a stylish, contemporary soaked, romp through cultures you would never have imagined could mix. Anyone who can read will find something to enjoy in this writing. Junot Diaz has a created a book with something special in it, perhaps you could call it the Wao factor.


8 out of 10