Young Ernest Hemingway as an ambulance driver in Italian Army in WWI - Inspiration for A Farewell to Arms
Ever since I started collecting and reading the books that have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, I have also been interested in the authors of these award-winning works. Since 1918 when the prize was first awarded to Ernest Poole for His Family, there have been 84 works of fiction given the Pulitzer Prize up through 2010. If no work of fiction was judged to meet the criteria of the Pulitzer Prize in a given year, no award was given. This was the case in 1920, 1941, 1946, 1954, 1957, 1964, 1971, 1974, and 1977. However, in 1957 an honorary Pulitzer award was given to Kenneth Roberts in the year he died for his outstanding historical novels including Arundel (1930) and Northwest Passage (1937). Over the years 53 men and 28 women for a total of 81 have been the winning authors. This number does not add up to the 84 works of fiction that have won the award. The explanation for this discrepancy is that three authors won the Pulitzer for two of their books: Booth Tarkington for The Magnificent Ambersons (1919) and Alice Adams (1922), William Faulkner for A Fable (1955) and The Reivers (1963), and John Updike for Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990).
The earliest-born winning authors were Edith Wharton (1862) and Booth Tarkington (1869) while the latest-born winners are Jhumpa Lahiri and Paul Harding both born in 1967 . The oldest living winning author is Herman Wouk (sounds like "woke") born in 1915. He won the Pulitzer in 1952 for The Caine Mutiny.
In my minor study of Pulitzer-winning authors, it has also been interesting to note their places of birth. Of the winners, 5 were born in New York City, 4 in Chicago, and 3 in Washington, DC. When the winners are analyzed by region of the country where they were born, it turns out that 24 were from Eastern states, 23 from Southern states, 22 from the Midwest, 4 from California, and 2 from Mountain West states (one from Colorado and one from Idaho). The West is under-represented except for the 4 from California. I will leave it to you to speculate on why Pulitzer winning authors are not likely to come from Western states.
The last point I want to make about Pulitzer winners is that many of them, like most good authors, write about that with which they are familiar or have experienced in their lives. I included Ernest Hemingway's picture at the beginning of this post to make the point. Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms about an American ambulance driver in the Italian army after having had that experience as a young man in 1918. Hemingway was foreign correspondent in Paris and ended up writing The Sun Also Rises. He served as war correspondent for American newspapers in the Spanish Civil War and then wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls; lived in Key West, Florida and wrote To Have and Have Not; spent time in Cuba and wrote his Pulitzer winning novel, The Old Man and the Sea.
Other Pulitzer winners used the same approach in writing about what they have experienced. Robert Olen Butler served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War and wrote a novel about people from Vietnam during and after the war, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992). John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, CA and wrote a number of novels that took place in and around Salinas including Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. Julia Peterkin owned with her husband a plantation in South Carolina and wrote Scarlet Sister Mary, a novel about the former slaves who continued to live on the plantation years after the Civil War. James A. Michener was a historian in the U.S. Navy in WWII who served in the South Pacific as used the stories he learned of as the basis for his Pulitzer winner, Tales of the South Pacific. Herman Wouk served as an officer on a Navy minesweeper in the Pacific in WWII and then wrote his great novel, The Caine Mutiny, which took place on a minesweeper in the Pacific and examined the psychological well-being and fitness of the ship's commanding officer.
Pearl S. Buck spent most of her life in China with missionary parents and used the experience to write The Good Earth. Willa Cather was raised in Nebraska and studied at the University of Nebraska. Many of her well-known novels such as One of Ours, O Pioneers, and My Antonia describe life on the Nebraska plains. Jhumpa Lahiri was born to parents from India living in London, England and wrote her Pulitzer winner, Interpreter of Maladies about the experiences of people from India living there and in foreign lands. Oliver LaFarge was a Harvard-trained anthropologist who studied the Navajo culture in the Southwest and wrote a wonderful novel about the challenges to the culture in his Laughing Boy. T. S. Stribling grew up in Tennessee in the 1880's and heard his parents and relatives tell stories about the Civil War and then wrote a wonderful three-part series about the Civil War in Alabama and Tennessee: The Forge, The Store, and The Unfinished Cathedral. Stribling's father fought in the Union Army while his mother's people were Confederate soldiers. His treatment of the Civil War and the reconstruction were much more from the Northern perspective about slavery and the hardships of former slaves after the Civil War compared to Atlanta native Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind which was quite sympathetic to the Southern perspective on the Civil War, slavery, and the reconstruction. Harper Lee grew up as a tomboy in small town Alabama in the 1930's and went on to write To Kill a Mockingbird which explored racial equality in the legal system. Incidentally, her father was a lawyer in the small Alabama town and her close friend Truman Copote served as the model for Dill in her novel. Even the character Boo Radley was based on an actual person in the town. The practice of Pulitzer-winning authors to write about their own life experiences is still being carried on. The most recent winner of the Pulitzer for fiction, Paul Harding, wrote his novel, Tinkers, about a man who spent his life repairing clocks. It turns out that Harding's father was a repairer of clocks and Paul served as his apprentice.
It has been particularly interesting for me to gain greater appreciation and understanding of the works Pulitzer-winning authors by learning something of their background and life experiences. I hope this information on will add to your interest and enjoyment in reading the Pulitzer-winning authors.
