The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. 

The Stone Diaries is one of the Pulitzer winners that I have put off reading because I had a feeling that I would not like it.  Well, it turns out that my hunch was right.  I kept reading it because I have committed to myself to read all of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  And I kept thinking that something interesting or exciting was going to happen.  The book is written as a diary of Daisy Goodwill who is born to a married couple in Manitoba, Canada.  Her mother dies the day she is born.  Father doesn't know his wife is expecting a child and he is busy as a stone cutter in the local quarry, so he goes back to work.  Daisy is raised by Mrs. Flett, a kind neighbor lady who liked Daisy’s mother.  At age 11, Daisy moves to Bloomington, Indiana with her father when he takes a job in a quarry in that locale.  She marries a man, Harold Hoad, when she is a young woman and he falls out of a window in Italy on their honeymoon.  Daisy is a young  widow and  remains single until she marries Mrs. Flett’s son, Barker, and moves to Ottawa,  Ontario.  They have three children and Barker eventually dies.  Daisy becomes an expert in gardening and raising plants.  She writes several newspaper columns on gardening, is popular in Ottawa for a while, and then she gets replaced by a newspaper journalist who wants the job.  Daisy gets depressed for a while and then moves to Florida and finds some of her old friends living there.  She is a grandma but her grandchildren live far away.  And  then  Daisy gets sick and old and eventually dies.   The book ends.

 

On page 340 of The Stone Diaries, Shields raises the question:  "What is the story of a life?  A chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression.”  I’m not sure what this means related to The Stone Diaries.  I wasn’t aware of much other than a chronicle of fact.  The impression I was left with is that the book is a story about nothing, like the TV show proposed by Jerry and George toward the end of the Seinfeld series.  But George and Jerry somehow made funny, entertaining stories based on nothing.  The Stone Diaries was about nothing without the entertainment.  But there may be another impression that I derived from reading The Stone Diaries.

 

After letting some time pass upon completing my reading of The Stone Diaries, perhaps the best thing I can say about the book is that it provides an example for living a life- an ordinary life of a good person. Daisy turns out to be a resilient woman who starts life without a mother, has a rather distant father, loses her first husband on the honeymoon, remarries an older man, has three children and raises them to be good people, is a popular gardening columnist until she’s replaced, gets depressed but doesn’t stay that way, moves to Florida, tries to be a good grandmother to kids who live far away, and ends up enduring several years of illness in her old age without becoming bitter.  The facts of her life allow us to form an impression of Daisy.  Maybe we need to be reminded of people who live ordinary lives well enough and endure hardships to the end- and hope that we too can be such a person.

 

Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor



Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor, 1955,

            Won Pulitzer Prize in 1956 

Andersonville is a book I remember my father, Herbert Isakson, reading in the 1950’s, soon after it was published.  I have been interested in it ever since I saw Dad reading the book but it has taken  me a while to get around to it.  I also greatly appreciate my father's example of one who read great literature.  He passed on to me a love of reading and my life has been wonderfully enriched because of reading.

 Andersonville is a historical novel of the Confederate prisoner of war camp in Anderson, Georgia.  Kantor had studied the Civil War and Andersonville for 25 years prior to writing the novel.  He states in his five-page bibliography that…” Andersonville is a work of fiction, but is presented as an accurate history of the Andersonville prison…”  I am very impressed that Kantor would devote the time and effort to learn what happened in Andersonville and then tell the story in a compelling, meaningful way. 

The  story of Andersonville prison is told from the perspective of many  individuals and families, probably fictional, who were involved as neighbors to the prison, prison adminstrators, guards, and physicians, and many of the Union prisoners.  This approach made the story of Andersonville come alive as Kantor created characters who represented what must have been the experiences of the people most affected by the prison.  There are many great books written about the Civil War including Pulitzer Prize winner The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.  Most books that I am aware of describe the battles and tell moving stories about horrible cost in human lives of the War Between the States.  However, Kantor chose to tell the story of the infamous Confederate prison in Andersonville.  At first I thought this would be a less interesting story than those told about the battles.  I was wrong in this assumption.  Andersonville tells of the tragedy that occurred after Union soldiers had been captured and sent to prison in Andersonville.  It may be that the North had prisons just as bad as Andersonville but I have not heard of those prisons.  What we do have is a carefully researched novel about conditions in Andersonville. 

Andersonville prison was built later in the war, sometime after the battle of Gettysburg.  It was built in the little town of Andersonville, close to a rail line.  The owner of the nearby plantation, Ira Claffey, is a central character in the novel and we see the prison from beginning to end through his eyes.  Ira is there to see a beautiful pine forest with a stream of fresh water running through it turned into a crude stockade surrounding about 20 acres.  He watches the trees being cut down by slave laborers who then placed the trees on end in a trench to form a 20 foot high wall.  The first prisoners arrived in February 1864 .  

 Kantor does not spare the reader the horrors that were documented in Andersonville.  The prison was designed to hold about 10,000 prisoners but by the end of the war, it held over 30,000 men in absolutely terrible conditions.  After the walls of the stockade had been put in place, nothing else was provided for the prisoners.  There were no shelters for the men except the tents they could make out of their coats or scraps of canvas.  Food given the men was minimal rations of cornbread.  No vegetables or meat were provided.  Water was not provided except for the little stream that ran through the stockade but it quickly became horribly polluted.  No toilets were provided.  Nearly all of the prisoners suffered from dysentery and scurvy.  Their teeth fell out when they tried to eat their hard cornbread after the scurvy became advanced.  If they got scratched, they often got gangrene infection and had maggots crawling through their rotting flesh.   The neighbors around the prison suffered from the stench of the open  sewer and dead bodies. 

 Kantor also does a fine job of portraying humanity at its best and its worst in Andersonville.  In one very touching section of the book, Ira Claffey organizes some of his neighbors to share their excess garden produce with the prisoners.  They haul wagon loads of vegetables to the stockade only to be turned back by order of the commander of Confederate prisons, General John Winder.  Winder castigated the townspeople for not bringing the vegetables for the Confederate prison guards and questioned their loyalty to the Southern cause due to their compassion for the Yankee prisoners.  This incident was included, in my opinion, to communicate that some in South had compassion for the prisoners while there were others who were determined to see the Yankees suffer and make their lives unbearable.  Another story symbolic of the humanity and the healing that would need to follow the war involved a young former Confederate soldier who lived nearby the prison.  He had lost one foot in battle and now hobbled around with a crude crutch, embittered by his loss.  While out hunting one day he came across an escaped Northern prisoner who was trying to steal the hawk the Reb had just shot.  The Yankee had lost one of his arms in the battle when he was captured.  To stay alive, he had escaped from Andersonville but had no means of finding shelter or food.  Rather than turn in the escaped Yankee for a reward, the Reb helped him find a place to hide and brought him food.  As the two became friends, it came out that the Yankee had worked in a shop where artificial limbs were crafted.  I will let you find out what happens between these two young casualties of the war.   I believe Kantor wanted to convey the spirit of healing and cooperation that was needed between North and South after the Civil War. 

The impression I came away with after reading Andersonville is that there were no real winners in the American Civil War.  Freeing the slaves and preserving the United States were causes that made the War worth fighting but the cost was enormous in terms of lives lost and the human suffering that resulted from the conflict.  Andersonville helped me better understand the degree of suffering inflicted on captured Northern soldiers.  Kantor conveyed that there were many among the Andersonville prison administration and guards who wanted to punish the Yankees and were not unhappy to see them die.  Toward the end of the War, when Andersonville came into being, the South was desperate for resources, both human and material.  Maybe they could not provide shelter, water and food for the prisoners but I believe conditions were worse in Andersonville than they had to be and Kantor seems to be making that point.  I am glad that I read Andersonville and I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about this unfortunate chapter of Civil War history and learn about the people who were affected so greatly by it.

Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature the same year he received the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt’s Gift in 1976 . He was given the Nobel Prize with the citation: “ …for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.” Evidently, Bellow demonstrated his understanding of human nature and an analysis of contemporary culture in Humboldt’s Gift. Von Humboldt Fleisher wrote a series of poetic ballads in the 1930’s and became famous. A young aspiring writer from Chicago named Charlie Citrine went to New York City after graduating from the University of Wisconsin to meet and try to learn from Humboldt. Humboldt’s Gift is the story of their relationship, sometimes inseparable friends and sometimes at odds with each other. Humboldt was brilliant and wanted to create art to embody the great ideas he had in his head. Charlie wrote biographies and histories and eventually became famous for writing a play, based on the Humboldt character
that was a big hit.

In the story Charlie won the Pulitzer Prize for his writing and Humboldt was made a professor of literature at Princeton University. Human nature and contemporary culture being what they are, Bellow had Humboldt gradually become mentally ill with bipolar disorder and a good helping of paranoia such that he ended up as a bum in the streets. He even turned on his buddy Charlie Citrine, accused him of trying to rob him, having an affair with his wife, and of trying to put him away in an institution. While they were still friends, Humboldt and Charlie entertained themselves by writing a couple of movie scenarios that were farcical but never intended as art. Charlie lost track of these manuscripts after he and Humboldt parted ways.

Humboldt dies and Charlie goes on living off from the proceeds of his past successes. He is divorced from his wife and she is trying to get all the money he has left because it is assumed that
Charlie can make plenty more once he sets his mind to work again. Some of Humboldt’s Gift is the telling of Charlie and Humboldt’s relationship and their struggles at the end. The bulk of the
book is an account of Charlie’s meditations, reflections, and free associations as he goes through his problems. When faced with a difficult situation, he likes to lie down on his large comfortable
couch and meditate on some topic such as the nature of boredom. Charlie is a vehicle for Bellow to be highly intellectual and literary but, for me, his writing style was too diverting from the story I wanted to appreciate. The reader learns a great deal about Charlie’s nature and how he fits in or, rather,doesn’t fit in very well into contemporary society.

As Charlie is starting to get desperate for money, he learns that before he died Humboldt left him a legacy. He learns that his buddy Humboldt has left him the two movie scenarios they wrote together with documented proof of the two of them having created the movie ideas. Furthermore, one of the scenarios has been made into a very popular, farcical movie and there is serious interest in the second idea. Charlie ends up getting out of his financial troubles through the gift left to him by Humboldt. It was ironic that the two writers who valued art and the intellect so much would resort to writing ridiculous yet entertaining movie scenarios that would appeal to so many movie goers in contemporary society. I suppose Bellow’s message is that art is the gift to the world of the truly gifted but much of the world cannot appreciate the art and would rather be entertained by something less artistic and intellectual like the farce the two artists spun out while bored. I’m afraid that my reaction to much of Humboldt’s Gift bears out this message. I want to be entertained with a story and not bogged down with intellectual musings and meditations. Other readers may want to test the quality of their literary tastes by reading Humboldt’s Gift to see if they can appreciate true art or if they are just one of the masses who want to be entertained by a story.

It took me almost three months to plow through Humboldt’s Gift and I am glad I read it. Now I know even more fully what type of reader and connoisseur of art I am. I would probably rather go to the movie farce than read Humboldt’s ballad poems. It would be interesting to discuss Humboldt’s Gift but I have never met anyone who has read the book.

The Store by T. S. Stribling, 1932

The Store by T. S. Stribling, written in 1932, is the second of a three-part series about the South, before, during, and after the Civil War. The first book is The Forge and the third is The Unfinished Cathedral. Together, the three books are an excellent description of the war told through the experiences of the Vaiden family. Unlike Gone With the Wind, the series by Stribling is not sympathetic to the Southern point of view of the war, of the institution of slavery or of the aftermath of the Civil War. Stribling grew up in a family in Tennessee where one of his grandfathers served in the Confederate Army and one served in the Union Army. The Forge starts with the Vaiden family on their small plantation just before the War. They live in Northern Alabama, close to Tennessee, and own a few slaves.

Miltiades Vaiden, is the central character in the series. He fights in the War, as described in The Forge, and comes out of it a colonel and is called by that title the rest of his life. The Vaiden family is followed through the War and afterward, to the end of the series. Miltiades Vaiden represents the valiant Confederate officer who brought honor to his state even though the South lost the war. Running through the series of books is the Vaiden family’s relationship with their slaves and former slaves. In The Store, the Colonel is without employment, barely living off the sharecroppers who work on their old plantation. For a time he is active in getting a local branch of the Ku Klux Klan started in his area. It’s interesting that the Klan was started, according to Stribling, as away of using fear and intimidation to keep the former slaves working on the estates as sharecroppers.

Through a dishonest act Miltiades gets the money to start a store. His wife dies and he marries the daughter of the woman he almost married at the outset of the War. In The Unfinished Cathedral, Miltiades is a wealthy banker who is trying to have a large cathedral built in his honor and as a place for him to be buried at the end of his life. The story ends as the Great Depression sets in and the wealth gained by Miltiades is lost and so is the cathedral he is building.

Miltiades is a flawed man who, when he no longer has the labor of slaves to sustain his wealth, turns to dishonest means to regain a position of influence. In the process, he leads other men in the Klan to intimidate the former slaves and keep their labor on the farms as sharecroppers. Miltiades succeeds in business for a time but fails in the end and dies a broken man. I think Stribling meant Miltiades to represent the South that benefited from slavery but lost in the end. I found it hard at times to read about how the slaves and freed slaves were treated by some Southerners. They were emancipated in the Civil War but were kept in their place by forces in the South that needed them as laborers and sharecroppers.

This is one more forgotten yet great novel that I found by reading the Pulitzer winners. I strongly recommend reading the series by Stribling, starting with the Forge. It is a great account of the South, slavery, reconstruction, and of the onset of the Great Depression.

Laughing Boy by Oliver LaFarge

             Laughing Boy is another of the great novels that I would never have heard of if I had not been collecting and reading the works that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  Laughing Boy can, perhaps, be described as “A Navajo Tragedy.”  Written in 1929 by La Farge who had been an anthropologist among the Navajo and other tribes of the Southwest, the book struck me as a rather authentic story of the impact of American culture on the Navajo people.  It was told by a white man living among the Indians and may have many inaccuracies and misinterpretations.  I have read some critiques of Laughing Boy that express the opinion that no white man can ever understand Indian culture.  Be that as it may, La Farge made a good effort and tells a story that was honored with a Pulitzer Prize and is well worth reading. 

I had strong feelings for the young Navajo man, Laughing Boy, as he encountered for the first time some of most damaging aspects of the Americans who had come to live in the Southwest.  The story tells of his meeting Slim Girl, a Navajo woman who had been taken from her family as a young girl and sent to a school for Indians in California.  When she finally made her way back to Navajo country, she found that she was neither American or Navajo.  She enticed Laughing Boy, a traditional Navajo, into marriage in order to help her find a way back to the Navajo way of life.  Instead, she led him into some of the worst aspects of American life.  With Slim Girl mixing drinks, Laughing Boy has his first taste of whiskey.  It’s a poignant moment when you realize how often this must have happened to Indian people who would become slaves to alcohol and ruined by its influence. 

Slim Girl tries to live in two worlds: the Navajo world with Laughing Boy and the American world with a man who pays her for sleeping with him.  She goes off during the day to clean house for the minister’s wife, as she tells Laughing Boy, but actually goes to meet her wealthy American.  Slim Girl justifies this by believing that she is getting even with the Americans who took her life away from her.  Laughing Boy eventually finds out about her double life, catches her with the American, and then reacts.  This is where real trouble begins. 
I won't give away anymore of the story but it has a  tragic ending.  Laughing Boy's faith and religious conviction from his Navajo upbringing and way of life help him go through what he has to face. Laughing Boy is a strong statement about how much good is in the traditional Navajo way of life.  Even if there are inaccuracies, Laughing Boy conveys the evil that was brought to the Navajos because of the Americans encroaching into their world and way of life.  This is an important book to read, especially by Americans who have grown up believing that the Indians were just savages who deserved to be run off their lands and herded onto reservations. 

Another of my favorite Pulitzer winners- Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin

Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin, 1928, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929.

I was fortunate to learn of this book from the list of winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Scarlet Sister Mary was written by Julia Peterkin who was the mistress of a former plantation in South Carolina named Lang Syne. She had lived on the plantation for 30 years prior to writing Scarlet Sister Mary. She gives an account of the former slaves and their descendants who once were the property of the plantations of South Carolina. In Peterkin’s book, the slaves, though emancipated in the Civil War, stayed on the plantation and worked for the owner or tried being share croppers. The African-American workers even lived in the former slave quarters. Scarlet Sister Mary was the daughter of a slave who had been born in the quarters. The book gives a fascinating glimpse into the lives of these people who were free to leave their old life but chose, in many cases, to stay on the land and do the work they knew. In Peterkin’s book, the plantation was very isolated and this may account for why the former slaves found it easier to stay where they were rather than venture out into the world.

One of the themes of Scarlet Sister Mary is the story of some young men and women leaving the plantation and seeking work, education, and sometimes pleasure in the world. In Mary’s case, her husband July left her shortly after they were married. Mary had a baby boy to take care of. July does not return for 20 years and when he does come back, she won’t take him back. Sister Mary gets the “Scarlet” added to her name because of the scarlet sins she commits as she goes through life supporting herself and her child with short-term relationships with a variety of men. In the process, they provide her with eight more children.

Because of her sins which the little community knows about, Mary is put out of her church by a vote of the deacons. Her struggle to finally be saved again, by vote of the deacons, forms much of her story. However, her desire to be a good Christian is set against her beliefs in the old ways, dating back to slavery times and possibly back to Africa. The people in the village believed in black magic, spells, conjurers, and other superstitions that somehow co-existed with their Christian beliefs. Mary’s struggle was between these two forces. She had a love-charm made Daddy Cudjoe that brought many men to her and perpetuated her sinful life. At the end of the book, Mary experiences another religious conversion brought on by the death of her son. But even after her conversion and re-acceptance into the church, Mary is unwilling to give up her love charm. Daddy Cudjoe asks her to give back the powerful “conjure rag” now that she is going to quit with men. Though scarlet no more, Sister Mary refuses and says it is all she has to keep her young. Her struggles with men and the struggle between living as a good Christian woman and a woman with special powers continues.

Scarlet Sister Mary is interesting, in part, because the dialog in the book is written as the people spoke. This seems authentic because Julia Peterkin lived around the descendants of slaves on her own plantation. She would have heard how they spoke and capture it in her novel. The message of Scarlet Sister Mary seems to be that Black women have had to be strong in many of their family situations. Mary had to be strong but also rely on her community and church as she raised her children. Scarlet Sister Mary gave me some good insights into what it might have been like for the freed slaves and their descendants in the years following the Civil War. The effects of slavery were not easily or quickly overcome.

Some interesting information about Pulitzer-winning authors

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.