I’ve decided to call my New Year’s Write-alution The Pulitzer Tour. That way if you those of you who want to pop in from time to time won’t feel pressured to catch up or frustrated that you have to slow down. Hop on anytime! Let us know what you’ve read and how you liked it and, most importantly, what you took away that helped or inspired your writing!
Because that’s what this is about for me. Improving my writing. Both quality and quantity. I’m such a huge proponent of Read Well, Write Well! I want to see what, out there through the decades, caught the discerning eye.
The very first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction/Novel is:
1917. A hundred year old book, well 104 year old book! While I’m not officially starting this, I did find a copy on Project Gutenberg! Which is wonderful since it’s free and after the Christmas I had, free is good! I sampled it just to see what I’d be getting myself into and I have to say….
I was pleasantly surprised! So many of the older books, classics, what not, that I’ve attempted had writing that was so removed and esoteric that it was a literal, (or literary effort maybe?), effort to read them.
Not this one! The writing was crisp and direct without being remedial. I was swept into the story in a few sentences. Now I’m very anxious to jump into the first stop on the tour.
And what about being first? Why was this Prize established when it was and why this novel? The Pulitzer was the love child of Joseph Pulitzer. An inspired, passionate, out-spoken journalist who left a provision in his 1904 will establishing the prize as an incentive to excellence. His goal for his prize was this: “the best editorial article written during the year, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in the right direction”
You can see, he Joesph wanted wool-pulling. He wanted exposed those room hogging elephants no one wanted to talk about or name. And he wanted it done well.
I can get behind that!
The Prize is a subjective animal. It’s still subject to the Board Process and, like its counterpart cousin The Oscar, the picks that win aren’t always the the time tested indelible choice. Catch-22, Catcher in the Rye, A Farewell to Arms, and The Great Gatsby just to name a few!
Back to His Family… I don’t want to post a blurb. I don’t want to read a blurb. I want to go into the book without expectation. Which, while doing research, is hard, by the way.
What I did find out was that Poole had published another novel, The Harbor, a few years earlier. The Harbor was, apparently, a stellar book and hailed by critics for it’s dedication to real life in New York. He researched the New York, Brooklyn waterfront district for years. Previously an outspoken journalist, Pooles place in the literary world came from The Harbor.
Buuuuut, there was no prize at the time it came out, so, when he published His Family, the board gave it thier nod in both a prize to His Family but mostly as a way to acknowledge his work on The Harbor as well.
The first prize was a win in absentia? How controversial! Right out of the gate. Yeah this is going to be an odd tour that my brain will have a hard time untangling from the weird tour of reality I’m on anyway.
Before the tour takes off from the tippy base, I have to finish Where The Crawdads Sing. One of those books all my friends raved about. I’m trying not to pick it apart. If the book doesn’t quite live up to my snobbish expectations, Delia Owens certainly does! What an amazing life and jump into the literary pool!
See what I did there?
Laura J. Hanson 
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