Tomorrow on this website we begin a grand review of the work that has won Pulitzer Prizes during the last century. Compiling it has been a historian’s dream. In so many ways, the history of the prizes is the history of the country and even the wider world.
The prize-winning lode is so rich that all of it cannot be presented or even fairly represented in the stream of content planned here. What you will see instead is an anthology of great journalism and a tribute to American arts and letters.
You’ll read Pulitzer history — milestones, controversies, reflections on the state of journalism and the arts, stories behind the stories. Material from our files will give you a sense of how winners are chosen and what jurors thought over the years about work that won — and work that did not.
You’ll read Pulitzer-winning poets' reflections on earlier Pulitzer-winning poets who influenced their poetry. Other arts and letters winners will tell you how they came to do the work they do.
“There is a somewhat romantic notion that composers are inspired by pain and chaos,” writes Music winner Melinda Wagner. “To a certain degree this is true, as our life experiences are a part of everything we do and the decisions we make.”
Or, as the biographer Megan Marshall writes: “Inevitably there are aspects of the subject with whom a biographer settles down that resonate with her own experience or aspirations.”
You’ll have a chance to go behind German lines during the battle of the Somme with Herbert Bayard Swope, to join Marguerite Higgins on the landing at Inchon during the Korean War, to experience Seymour Hersh’s revelations about My Lai just as they appeared to readers across the country in 1969.
You’ll read Shirley Scott’s take on what it was like to be black in America more than 50 years ago and to ponder how much has really changed. Gene Miller’s dogged determination to see justice done will come alive on the page once more. You’ll chuckle at Robin Givhan’s cheeky observations about the sartorial contrast between Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice.
We have chosen four themes for the Pulitzer Prize centennial observation: Civil Rights and Social Justice, The Presidency and the Press, War and Peace, and Power and Accountability. Much — though far from all — prize-winning work falls within these themes. The content here will reflect this.
For example, we’ll tell you what Pulitzer jurors had to say about both of Robert Caro’s winners, "The Power Broker" and "Master of the Senate." We’ll share juror comments on Pulitzer-winning biographies of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harry Truman, W.E.B. Dubois, Andrew Jackson, George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant. You’ll be able to follow the brisk but cordial debate 50 years ago between jurors Barbara Tuchman and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. over the Biography prize. And the jury report on the first Pulitzer awarded to an African-American — Gwendolyn Brooks for Poetry in 1950 — will appear in full.
A few trends behind the history of the prizes emerge from our immersion in this work.
One is the robust progress of scholarship in American history and biography. Entries in these categories were often few in the early years of the prizes. Even the winners tended to lack evidence of deep, documented research. This changed profoundly over the years as universities and archives flourished all across the country.
A paternalistic instinct infected the early plan of award — a desire to deny the prize to any work deemed unwholesome and to reward work that promoted patriotism and good citizenship.
The wholesomeness issue nearly robbed the playwright Eugene O’Neill of his first Pulitzer Prize in 1920. One juror disliked "Beyond the Horizon" for “its depressing delineation of a decaying family.” He favored instead "Abraham Lincoln," a play written by an Englishman. A fellow juror shot back that "Abraham Lincoln" was no more an American play than Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet" was an Italian play.
This proved to be only the first salvo in the “wholesome” debate. "Main Street" by Sinclair Lewis was the literary smash of 1920. But Hamlin Garland, the same juror who had tried to block O’Neill, saw the book as a “vicious and vengeful” attack on middle-class values. This time, the Fiction jury buckled, giving the prize to Edith Wharton’s "The Age of Innocence." Wharton accepted it, but when she learned of the circumstances, she wrote Lewis: “When I discovered that I was being rewarded — by one of our leading Universities — for uplifting American morals, I confess I did despair.”
Seven years later, a jury voted the prize to Lewis’s "Arrowsmith." He sent back the money along with a scathing public letter. He would simply not accept an award for “the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.”
“This phrase, if it means anything whatever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment,” he wrote.
The “wholesome” language soon vanished, and Pulitzer Prize juries were urged simply to recommend the best book in each category.
The prizes were a product of their time in other ways. For the first 63 years, only white males served on the board that awarded them. In 1979-80, the columnist William Raspberry of The Washington Post and Roger Wilkins of the Joint Center for Political Studies, also in D.C., became the first African-American board members. Hanna H. Gray, president of the University of Chicago, became the first women.
Half a century ago, when the Pulitzer Prizes celebrated their 50th anniversary, five renowned winners, all white men, gave short speeches about the state of their disciplines. Those speeches will appear as part of the centennial content stream, but it is worth sharing a highlight or two here.
Representing journalism was James B. Reston of The New York Times. One of the best-known journalists of his day, he had won two Pulitzer Prizes by 1966 and would later serve for 12 years on the Pulitzer Prize Board.
“I believe in my profession,” Reston told the gathering at the Pulitzer dinner. “For all its troubles it never had a better chance of public service or a greater opportunity for creative minds than it does today. . . . Just as the 19th century was the century of the novelist, so this post-war phase may be the era of the journalist."
Aaron Copland, the composer, had won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1945 for "Appalachian Spring." He sounded a note of astonishment about the state of musical composition.
“The plain fact is that we are living today in the midst of an unprecedented musical revolution,” he said. “The art I practice is in the process or being dismantled, broken down into component parts, and put together in ways we never dreamed of.”
He even mentioned the emergence of computers, saying: “IBM has gotten into the act. Computer 7090, if fed the necessary information, can write out its own music and perform it. Isn’t it astonishing how quickly all of us have become accustomed to the idea that we can have a new kind of music: music without instruments, without performers, and even without composers?”
The Pulitzer Prize Board’s attitude toward change justified Reston’s confidence about the future of journalism. While the board’s progress was slower than ideal on the diversity front, it consistently rewarded coverage that exposed corruption and challenged power, including the Jim Crow regime in the South. This trend in upholding and defending the First Amendment made the prizes coveted and encouraged fearless inquiry and bold comment in the press.
In recent years, the prizes have had no choice but to accelerate the pace of change. The Pulitzer Prize Board and its juries are routinely diverse. Its non-arts-and-letters prizes are rapidly becoming rewards for text-based American journalism on any platform rather than exclusively newspaper prizes.
These changes — in who is choosing the winners and in what the prizes are being given for — have greatly broadened the field in all categories. The content displayed on this site for the centennial will reflect this growing diversity and spirit of transition.
As the Pulitzer Prizes enter a second hundred years, we hope the stories here provide both a curbside seat for the century-long Pulitzer parade and a reminder of the enduring values behind good journalism and a vibrant culture of arts and letters. Let us look forward while looking back.