2014 Pulitzer Prize Award for Fiction: The Goldfinch

The Pulitzer Prizes winners have been announced for 2014. 

The winner of the Pulitzer for Fiction is The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt.  Other finalists for fiction are The Son, by Philipp Meyer and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, by Bob Shacochis.

At this point, I have read 49 of the 87 Pulitzer Prize winners.  My quest goes ever on.

No Winner for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

Via Omnivoracious

The 2012 Pulitzer prizewinners and nominated finalists were announced today, and there was no winner for the Fiction Prize. Last year's winner was Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad.

This year's finalists in fiction were Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace.

Well, that’s interesting. The last time no award was given out for Fiction was 1977. Before that, 1974 and 1971. In total, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has not been awarded ten times. This includes the period from 1918 to 1947 when it was the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel.

I am very far behind on my Pulitzer Prize reading, so at the very least, the committee has given me an additional year to help catch up without an additional winner.

Looking at the history of the award, I’ve always wondered what went on behind the scenes for the jury to arrive at “No Award” as the best option. I assume it’s the inability to find consensus, but I’d just love to get more of the story on how that came to be – this year and previous years.

Below are the other winners of this year’s Pulitzer:

LETTERS, DRAMA and MUSIC

Fiction - No award
Drama - "Water by the Spoonful" by Quiara Alegría Hudes
History - Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by the late Manning Marable (Viking)
Biography - George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis (The Penguin Press)
Poetry - Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf Press)
General Nonfiction - The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton and Company)
Music - Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts by Kevin Puts (Aperto Press)

JOURNALISM

Public Service - The Philadelphia Inquirer
Breaking News Reporting - The Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News Staff
Investigative Reporting - Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Chris Hawley of the Associated Press and Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong of The Seattle Times
Explanatory Reporting - David Kocieniewski of The New York Times
Local Reporting - Sara Ganim and members of The Patriot-News Staff, Harrisburg, Penn
National Reporting - David Wood of The Huffington Post
International Reporting - Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times
Feature Writing - Eli Sanders of The Stranger, a Seattle (Wash.) weekly
Commentary - Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune
Criticism -Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe
Editorial Writing - No award
Editorial Cartooning - Matt Wuerker of POLITICO
Breaking News Photography - Massoud Hossaini of Agence France-Presse
Feature Photography - Craig F. Walker of The Denver Post

2010 Pulitzer Prize Winners

Via Omnivoracious, the 2010 Pulitzer Prize Winners have been announced.

Fiction: Tinkers, by Paul Harding
History: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed
Biography: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, by T.J. Stiles
General Nonfiction: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy, by David E. Hoffman
Poetry: Versed, by Rae Armantrout
Drama: Next to Normal, by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey

I was aware of the eventual History and Biography winners, but Tinkers? Never heard of it. Just reserved it at the library.

Pulitzer Prizes Announced

Credit to Omnivoracious for the link, but here are some of the Pulitzer Prize winning works.

* Fiction: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Finalists: The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich and All Souls by Christine Schutt)

* History: The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed (Finalists: This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust and The Liberal Hour by G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot)

* Biography/Autobiography: American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Finalists: Traitor to His Class by H.W. Brands and The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll)

* General Nonfiction: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon (Finalists: Gandhi and Churchill by Arthur Herman and The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe by William I. Hitchcock)

* Poetry: The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin (Finalists: Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart and What Love Comes To by Ruth Stone)

* Drama: Ruined by Lynn Nottage (Finalists: Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo and In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes)


Well, that adds another novel to my reading list. I've got this slow moving and insane quest to read all the Pulitzer Prize winning novels. I've read 33 of the now 83 winners. I'd have loved to see Louise Erdrich win the Prize. Erdrich has long been one of my favorite novelists, ever since I first read Love Medicine a decade ago in college. That opening sequence with June Morrissey walking out into the snow still moves me.

Otherwise, I love Presidential biographies, so I'll be sure to check out American Lion.

Unconsumed: Arrowsmith

In my quest to read every Pulitzer Prize winning novel I come to Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. Arrowsmith picked up the Pulitzer for the 1926 season. It features a young man named Martin Arrowsmith who studies to become a doctor. He is from a fictional town in a fictional state somewhere in the neighborhood of Indiana (there is a place called Wheatsylvania, too). The first hundred pages feature Martin running around with two women at the same time, getting kicked out of school, returning to school, getting married, studying hard, and just being a young medical student in the 1920's. A hundred pages of this and despite all of these things happening during the first hundred pages I would swear nothing really happened. I had to keep going back and reading the previous couple of pages to remember what just happened and that's not a good sign.

I actually read 140 pages of Arrowsmith before I accepted the fact that I just did not care and that it would take me two more weeks to finish the book and that it was not worth the time spent reading it. Arrowsmith is only the third Pulitzer Prize winning novel (out of the 30 I have read) which I have been unable to finish. The other two are The Age of Innocence and The Able McLaughlins. While Arrowsmith was better and more readable than the other two, it just was not worth the effort...and that's what it would have been, an effort. 140 pages and we haven't touched upon the central issue of medical ethics which supposedly the entire novel is about. It may have been Sinclair Lewis's Masterpiece, winning the Pulitzer and helping Lewis along for the Nobel, but it's not for me.

Next Up:
March, by Geraldine Brooks
Early Autumn, by Louis Bromfield

Unconsumed: The Able McLaughlins

It isn't often I do not finish a book. Every book worth starting is a book worth finishing, that's what I used to think. But now I don't want to waste my time with a book that is making me suffer from the start.

I'm working on the Pulitzer Prize winning novels and some of the early winners can be just turgid. Alice Adams was pretty decent, but The Able McLaughlins? Painful. I made it twenty pages in and gave up. Margeret Wilson, the author, was explaining things to me about the characters and not telling me a story. The distinction is fine and narrow, but the use of language and the characters, one of whom came home from a war, the Civil War, I think, but it was difficult to tell what era the book was set in because she seems to be telling two different stories on the same page without anything to differentiate them.

I'm sure things would come clear as the novel progressed, but Wilson lost me early on and I was done.

This is only the second Pulitzer winner which I have quit on (the other being The Age of Innocence). Shoot, I even f inished Angle of Repose...and that's a book that wanted to set me in an angle of repose.

On to Gilead!