When the Pulitzer Prizes were announced in 2010, the book industry got one of the biggest shocks in the history of the prize (certainly the biggest Pulitzer surprise of my lifetime): a little-known novella from a small publisher had pulled off a tremendous upset by claiming the fiction award. In an article written ten years after the fact, Michele Filgate (who will factor into the story again later) wrote that it was “one of the biggest surprises in the history of American letters.”
I worked at Borders when this happened. Not a single person in the store had even heard of Tinkers or Paul Harding. We had never had a copy in our store and it took weeks to get any in stock. This is not an uncommon experience; according to The New York Times, only 7,000 copies of Tinkers had been sold before the Pulitzer Prizes were announced. In fact, The New York Times was so surprised by the victory that they had to publish an article explaining how they hadn’t noticed Tinkers before, referring to it as “the one that got away” because they hadn’t even reviewed the book before it won.
In 2010, before the Pulitzer, Paul Harding seemed much more like an author who was primed for future success–if you had heard of him at all, that is. The New York Times notes that “Within an hour of the Pulitzer announcement, Random House sent out a news release boasting of the two-book deal it had signed with Mr. Harding late in 2009. A few days later the Guggenheim Foundation announced he had received one of its prestigious fellowships.” The more usual career path would have relegated his debut novel, Tinkers, to nothing more than a test case: a trial run to get more people interested in his next book, which would have (hopefully) had an actual marketing budget and a major publisher to back it up.
Instead, Harding enjoyed a wildly improbable rise to literary success. Now, in 2023, he has released his third novel, This Other Eden, and been longlisted for the Booker Prize. As we wait to learn if he will become the first person to win both a Pulitzer Prize and a Booker, let’s try to find out just how this staggering upset happened in the first place.
Snapshot: 2009
Here’s a peak at what was going on in the world the year Tinkers was published.
In bookstores: The bestselling book in the United States was Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. The Nobel Prize for Literature went to Herta Müller, “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”
In movies: Slumdog Millionaire, which was released the year earlier, claimed the Academy Award for Best Picture. The Hurt Locker would go on to win the following year, defeating the movie with the biggest box office toll of 2009: Avatar.
In the news: Many in the United States were swept up in the “balloon boy” hoax, which is too difficult to explain here so I recommend you check out the Wikipedia page of the incident. Many were also captivated by the miraculous Hudson River plane landing pulled off by Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.
What Is Tinkers About?
The first sentence reads “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.” As the book counts down the hours until his death, we also read the story of his father, an epileptic salesman named Howard. That’s kind of it. At least, that’s it without spoiling the cause of the rift between father and son (and the rift between Howard and his own father). There’s more of a plot in the sections devoted to Howard in that he goes around and does things, experiencing a sort of progression along the way.
I guess you could say that Howard’s story is the inverse of George’s for much of the book: while Howard walks around in nature and comes to a decision that will impact his family, George lies in a hospital bed vaguely watching his family prepare for the end through a sort of dream state. In other words, Howard is activating while George is declining. The fact that Howard is long gone by the time we meet George makes this something of an examination into the fleeting nature of life.
Most reviews I see of this book mention that it is a celebration of the everyday, but I don’t see much at all about how Harding was inspired by transcendental thinking (and how that inspiration is also felt in his new novel, This Other Eden). On the tenth anniversary of Tinkers, here’s how Harding explained his approach in LitHub:
I came to think of the work as more or less transcendentalist, since so many of my favorite writers came out of that tradition: Emerson, Melville, Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, even Faulkner, even, maybe especially, Shakespeare (the last two of whom usually are not thought of as transcendentalists, but I claim them nonetheless!). Prevalent among their works is the privileging of our common humanity by virtue of examining and describing common human experience while forbearing any impulse to explain it.
Paul Harding, “When a Very Small Press Wins a Pulitzer”
How Did This Win a Pulitzer Prize?
My initial theory going into my reading of Tinkers had to do with the person who provided the blurb on the front cover of the American edition: Marilynne Robinson. At the time Tinkers was published, she was a recent Pulitzer Prize winner herself thanks to Gilead. She was a teacher of Paul Harding’s and became a friend (and supporter) of his. I assumed that Robinson had used her clout to get people to pay attention to her former student.
What I ended up finding is that this is actually a story about the power of independent bookstores–which, naturally, THRILLED me.
Although to be fair, it isn’t just independent booksellers who made this happen. It might be more accurate to call Tinkers a spectacular beneficiary of word-of-mouth success. This is a book that had a difficult time getting noticed but which generated a lot of enthusiasm from people who did read it. Gregory Cowles, who wrote that New York Times article about how they had failed to notice Tinkers, noted the following:
I first heard of “Tinkers” nine months after it was published, when a judge for the Center for Fiction’s first-book award enthused about it to me. (It was a finalist, but it lost to John Pipkin’s “Woodsburner.”) But just because we missed the book doesn’t mean everybody did: it received glowing reviews from, among others, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker and The Boston Globe.
Gregory Cowles, “‘Tinkers’ by Paul Harding: The One That Got Away”
Tinkers was also included among NPR’s list of the best debut fiction for the year and was counted as one of the year’s best books by The New Yorker.
But even with this level of critical recognition, it still would have seemed more likely that Harding was being primed for future success. And that takes us to the independent bookstore connection.
When The New York Times interviewed Harding in a report on how this happened, he was quick to thank “Lise Solomon, a sales representative in Northern California for Consortium, the book’s distributor, who passionately advocated for the novel with booksellers; and the booksellers and critics who embraced the book early on.” The article goes on to quote Michele Filgate, an events manager for RiverRun Bookstore in New Hampshire, who had this to say: “This shows how indie bookstores truly are the ones that can be movers and shakers when it comes to a book.”
Filgate is the important piece of the puzzle here. Not only did she rave about Tinkers on Bookslut (a now-defunct book blog), but she is credited as the person who introduced the novella to a former editor of The New York Times Book Review named Rebecca Pepper Sinkler during a book reviewing workshop that Sinkler had led in New Hampshire in April of 2009 (not long after Tinkers was published). You might be asking why this matters. Well, Rebecca Pepper Sinkler was the chair of the Pulitzer jury for fiction books published in 2009.
Boom.
The events manager of an independent bookstore is singlehandedly responsible for bringing Tinkers to the attention of the Pulitzer jury and causing the biggest Pulitzer surprise of all time.
The reason no one at my Borders had heard of Tinkers was that we didn’t have the infrastructure for this kind of community bookselling. If we were hearing about a book it was because the company was being paid by the publisher to run a marketing campaign.
Furthermore, it’s very expensive to find a first edition of Tinkers because the first print run consisted of only 3,500 copies. “Then a sales rep in San Francisco fell in love with the book. She got the book buyer at the independent bookstore Book Passage interested, and that book buyer brought Harding to the store for a signing event. Soon he was visiting other bookstores and [getting] invited to speak at book clubs,” according to NPR. So the fact that Tinkers had sold “only” 7,000 copies at the time it won the Pulitzer is actually an enormous triumph. That’s double the book’s initial print run! And you can credit independent bookstores for that.
I love this story. Support independent bookstores.
Another gem of a story about this: perhaps because there were so few expectations for Tinkers on Pulitzer day, no one called him to tell him that he had won. He wasn’t restlessly waiting for the announcement to come. Here’s what Harding told NPR about finding out:
Harding was alone when he checked the Pulitzer website, curious to find out who had won.
“I came as close to actually fainting as I think I ever have, because I literally just could not believe what I saw when it came up on the website,” Harding says with a laugh. “And I kept refreshing and it just kept coming up Tinkers, Tinkers, Tinkers.“
Lynn Neary, “For A Tiny Press, The Pulitzer Arrives Out Of Nowhere”
Harding then ran to the office of Marilynne Robinson, his former teacher who (again) had won her own Pulitzer just a few years earlier. She told him “It’s the American equivalent of a knighthood. It’s your title now: Pulitzer Prize–winning author.”
I love literally everything about this story.
How Was Tinkers Even Published?
Even the story of how Harding got Tinkers published is wild. Here’s how the New York Times analysis of Harding’s win begins:
Six years ago Paul Harding was just another graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with a quiet little novel he hoped to publish. He sent copies of the manuscript, in which he had intertwined the deathbed memories of a New England clock repairer with episodes about the dying man’s father, to a handful of agents and editors in New York. Soon after, the rejection letters started to roll in.
Motoko Rich, “Mr. Cinderella: From Rejection Notes to the Pulitzer”
The manuscript for Tinkers infamously sat in a desk drawer for three years before Harding finally got interest from Bellevue Literary Press, a publishing imprint that had barely even existed at this point and which only had two employees: Erika Goldman, the editorial director, and an assistant. That’s it. No wonder no one called him to tell him he had won a Pulitzer!
Now, you have to hear this passage from NPR’s interview with Harding after he won. It’s insane and wonderful:
Their office is in a most unusual setting for a publishing company, “nestled,” as Goldman puts it, “within the department of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine, which is at Bellevue Hospital.”
Bellevue is a major center for emergency services in New York City, but it is probably best known in the public imagination as a mental hospital. The hospital’s literary press was established five years ago, mainly for the publication of high-end medical books. But Goldman, a veteran of the publishing business, is also committed to releasing works of fiction with a scientific or medical theme. A publishing colleague who had passed on Tinkers because it didn’t seem right for his company thought it might work for Bellevue.
Goldman says she responded immediately.
Lynn Neary, “For A Tiny Press, The Pulitzer Arrives Out Of Nowhere”
Let’s break this down for a second: the only reason Bellevue (the only publisher who was even interested, by the way) could publish Tinkers is because one of the characters is epileptic.
By all accounts, Harding hasn’t forgotten that it was a small press and independent booksellers who championed his work when no one else would. When Bellevue published a tenth-anniversary edition of Tinkers, this is what he had to say in an essay on LitHub:
When Tinkers made it into print, I gained degrees of appreciation and love for independent publishers and bookstores I otherwise would not have had. I will forever be grateful that working with Erika Goldman at Bellevue Literary Press gave me entrance into the company of people who devote their lives to finding, editing, publishing, pitching, and selling books that might otherwise be overlooked, who do so for the same reasons I discovered over the years of learning to make art for art’s sake, and who do so from the often-fragile tabernacles of independent publishing houses and independent bookshops.
Paul Harding, “When a Very Small Press Wins a Pulitzer”
When the two-book deal from Random House came in after Tinkers was published, he only accepted with the blessing of Erika Goldman, who encouraged him not to turn it down. He still considers himself an ambassador for small presses and independent booksellers.
Is This Novel Any Good?
In recent years, I’ve heard a lot of people refer to Tinkers as one of the best books published this century. Personally, I liked it a lot and I admire it greatly. But I didn’t love it. And I think that comes down to a personal preference. Harding’s writing can be a bit overly complicated for me. His sentences can be long, bordering on run-on territory, containing multiple shifts in perspective or time. I’m glad I read This Other Eden first, because it allowed me to understand that this is a stylistic feature of Harding’s writing.
I have this weird thing: when no one is around, I like to read aloud to myself (or to my dog Jamie, if she’s around). I like hearing the words flow. There’s musicality and rhythm that you only really find if you say the words. Maybe this is why I like audiobooks so much. Anyway, the majority of Harding’s writing flows as beautifully as Marilynne Robinson’s (it really does not feel surprising that there’s a connection between the two writers). But some of it is oddly difficult to read out loud. You start tripping over your tongue. The same thing happens if you read silently, but it feels more pronounced when you read out loud.
Having read two of Harding’s books back-to-back, it appears that this is a sort of signature style in his writing. It’s as if he doesn’t want you to flow along in his words. He wants you to stop, wants you to reread and consider. He is forcing you to actively read his words.
I can see how this would annoy some readers–indeed, I’ve seen reviews online that refer to the writing as fussy. And it is fussy at times. For me, there is a big payoff. But I’m probably never going to love the experience either.
I don’t play music, so this metaphor probably doesn’t make sense, but let’s go with it: imagine you’re playing the piano and getting swept up in the music. All of a sudden, you hit a discordant note. You stop playing and look closer at the sheet music. It actually makes sense. So you play it again, and this time through you still hear the discordant note, but in the flow of all the other notes it somehow sounds beautiful. That’s Paul Harding as a writer.
I think of Harding’s writing as being very close to his former teacher, Marilynne Robinson, in style. But I’ve also seen his work compared to William Faulkner, which also fits. So I explain Paul Harding by saying that it’s like William Faulkner and Marilynne Robinson had a baby. I will always respond more to the beauty and simplicity of his Robinson half. But there’s still a lot of depth to be found in the Faulkner half.
I would even say that there are passages in Tinkers that are face-slappingly good (as in, you read a sentence that’s so good it leaves you feeling abruptly stunned, like you’ve been slapped in the face. So you reread the passage several times and it’s not enough because it’s just. so. good.
And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.
Paul Harding, Tinkers (page 72)
You can also see the fingerprints of Harding’s transcendental inspiration there. Human and nature are inextricably linked in Harding’s novels. To experience the world is to experience nature. We are all trying to do our best but can be easily corrupted.
There is staggering beauty to be found in Tinkers. But I find that I want to love it more than I do. The same is true, incidentally, of This Other Eden. Still, they are, objectively, very good novels. And Harding is a talent I will continue to explore–first with Enon, then with whatever comes next.
Who Is Paul Harding?
Paul Harding grew up in Wenham, Massachusetts (north of Boston), and spent a lot of time in the woods. Harding also apprenticed under his grandfather, who fixed clocks (undoubtedly a source of inspiration for the clockwork in Tinkers).
While on break from touring as the drummer in a rock band named Cold Water Flats, Harding took a summer writing class at Skidmore that was taught by Marilynne Robinson (who had only released one novel, Housekeeping, at that point). She got him interested in the famous Iowa Writers Workshop, where he learned from Barry Unsworth and Elizabeth McCracken before ending up in another of Robinson’s classes.
Harding studied theology after noticing that many of the people he admired were very religious, which is how he became, as he calls it, “a self-taught modern New England transcendentalist.”
Are There Adaptations or Sequels?
Actually, there are. Harding’s second book, Enon, follows Charlie, the grandson of George Crosby. Charlie appears, or sort of appears, in Tinkers as one of two dreamlike grandsons who occasionally sit with George during his last days. And Harding’s third novel, This Other Eden, heavily features the town of Enon. So Harding is steadily building a universe of novels that are loosely (and sometimes directly) connected).
Is Tinkers the Great American Novel?
I have frequently linked my Pulitzer Project to the concept of the elusive Great American Novel. This is largely because when the Pulitzer Prize began, it had very similar intentions as the discourse around The Great American Novel: legitimize American art as worthy of praise and recognition.
While Tinkers is an admirable novella, I don’t think it really fits into this conversation.
What Was Tinkers‘ Competition for the Pulitzer?
The most direct competition would, of course, be the other finalists from 2009: Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and Lydia Millet’s Love in Infant Monkeys. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a story collection about social status and expectations within Pakistani culture that was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Love in Infant Monkeys is also a story collection, taking a shot at our cultural fascination with famous people by telling stories about celebrities having encounters with animals.
I find it very interesting that the other two finalists were both story collections because in recent years, story collections have had a very difficult time making headway with the Pulitzer Board. The last time a true short story collection won a Pulitzer was Interpreter of Maladies in 2000 (a full decade before the Pulitzer Board met to discuss these finalists). Collections of linked stories did win, however, the year before (Olive Kitterridge) and the year after (A Visit From the Goon Squad).
It’s tempting to go down a rabbit hole speculating about whether or not Tinkers became the most likely winner out of this group simply because it was the only novel (or if that was deliberate on the part of the jury), but at the end of the day, Tinkers just has a lot to recommend it. I haven’t read In Other Rooms, Other Wonders or Love in Infant Monkeys, but I have a hard time believing that they could feel more worthy than Tinkers.
Outside of the finalists, there was also Colum McCann’s National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin, a novel that sort of takes the form of linked stories set on the day Philippe Petit walked on a high wire between the towers of the World Trade Center.
The only other potential competitors I see from 2009 are Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, Jayne Anne Philipps’ Lark and Termite, and Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage.
Should Tinkers Have Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?
There are times when bizarre circumstances lead to the correct conclusion–even if the result felt wildly inconceivable to most people who were paying attention at the time. Tinkers winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was a shock. But it was correct.
I think about the mix-up at the Academy Awards when La La Land was accidentally named the Best Picture winner and as the cast and crew were on stage celebrating, it was revealed that Moonlight had actually won. It was like the universe had made a correction in real time. And in this case, an events manager from an independent bookstore is standing in for the stage hand who rushed out with the correct envelope.
And if you take away Harding’s Pulitzer, there’s no guarantee that he would have broken through with Enon, which had a very quiet release. That also means that there’s no guarantee This Other Eden would have gotten the kind of release that caught Booker’s attention. The whole arc of Paul Harding’s career depends on Tinkers becoming an improbable success. In my opinion, he deserved it.
I think there are a lot of people who would prefer Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin instead of Tinkers, but I am not one of them. I was not particularly impressed by that book, being honest.
And I will forever love that what seemed like a mystery is actually a story about people who are passionate about books spreading that love and getting the right book into the right hands.
Now all we need to do is wait and see if Paul Harding becomes the first person to win a Pulitzer Prize and a Booker Prize during their career.
Other Pulitzer Prize Deep Dives
His Family (1918) • Now in November (1935) • Gone With the Wind (1937) • The Grapes of Wrath (1940) • To Kill a Mockingbird (1961) • The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983) • Lonesome Dove (1986) • Interpreter of Maladies (2000) • March (2006) • Tinkers (2010) • Less (2018) • The Netanyahus (2022) • TIE: Trust and Demon Copperhead (2023) • Night Watch (2024)
Deep Dives On Pulitzer Years With No Winner
Supposedly Fun 