Supposedly Fun

If you know me, you know I am a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction fanatic. I have been following the prize closely for about twenty years now (if you would like more on my origin story as a Pulitzer fan, I discuss it in my deep dive on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies). Any fan of any annual tradition knows very well that there are ebbs and flows to fandom. There are going to be off-years. That’s true if you follow the Pulitzer Prizes, the Booker Prize, the Academy Awards, any sports team, and so on. Honestly, that’s part of the joy in the process. It would probably get boring if it was always good. You just have to remember that there’s always next year.

That type of thinking has gotten me through slumps in my fandom. But at this point, it feels like a troubling new trend is emerging with the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. And as any good fan must do when something they love falters, I find myself asking: Is the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in trouble?

I am asking this question after several years of predominantly lackluster winners in the fiction category. Because that has been the trend for a decade now, it doesn’t feel like this is a case of just an off year here and there. It is beginning to feel systemic. And it has to be said that the function of the Pulitzer Prize Board (specifically its insularity and secretiveness) feels out of date and possibly needs refreshing.

I don’t necessarily want to besmirch the recent fiction winners, but I do think the quality of the winners has gone down on average over the last decade. Oddly, the 2012 controversy acts as a sort of dividing line for quality control purposes. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction had been on an absolute roll when 2012 happened. The winners from 1999 through 2011 are solid as a rock. I might quibble that I would have given the 1999 prize to Barbara Kingsolver for The Poisonwood Bible or that I think the 2009 award should have gone to Louise Erdrich for The Plague of Doves, but do you know what books they would be replacing? Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. Even if you leave things as they are, it’s an incredible lineup of books. No duds.

Things have been different since the Pulitzer had that off year. Some books have been largely forgotten, like The Orphan Master’s Son or The Night Watchman (which also feels far too much like a consolation prize for overlooking Louise Erdrich so many times in the past). There are cilantro books (you either like them or you hate them, there’s very little in between) like The Goldfinch or The Overstory. The Sympathizer and Trust are interesting choices but, in my opinion, just okay books. Less, The Netanyahus, and Night Watch are cilantro books at best, but I feel confident calling them bad wins full stop. There are only four that I would say stand up to the quality the Pulitzer has set for itself: All the Light We Cannot See, The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys, and Demon Copperhead–and I’m a little iffy on including The Nickel Boys in that group. If you’re keeping score, only four out of the last 13 winners are great, six are okay (depending on your response), and three feel like the completely wrong choice. That’s not a great record.

Your mileage will obviously vary. I know many people who actually finished and liked The Goldfinch and The Overstory. I know people who liked The Netanyahus and Night Watch (although I always notice that even positive reviews of Night Watch end up complaining about aspects of the book). I’ve certainly talked to people who don’t like Demon Copperhead nearly as much as I do. Reading is subjective: no one is right and no one is wrong. What makes a book prizeworthy is also subjective. That makes this a difficult conversation to have, and honestly that’s why it has taken me so long to put these thoughts down. If you don’t think there’s a problem with recent Pulitzer winners, that’s fine.

However, as someone who frequently discusses the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on the Internet, I know that I’m far from the only one concerned about the state of the prize. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who either aren’t thrilled with recent selections, don’t understand how the Pulitzer works, don’t think it’s as fun as other major book prizes, or some combination of all those things. So I think it’s worth talking about.

I want to say that any time I discuss the Pulitzer, and especially when I get a little critical of it, I start getting comments that are some variation of “I never take the Pulitzer seriously because it’s not a serious prize.” Let’s not do that. It’s a serious prize–you just don’t like it. That’s fine, but let’s not pretend it isn’t a significant award. A lot of people take it seriously; I’ve met a lot of them as I’ve traveled along in my project to read all the fiction winners. This is not an invitation to dunk on the Pulitzer. It’s a conversation about whether or not improvements could be made and what those improvements could look like.

Having said that, I think the Pulitzer hasn’t adapted all that well to the modern moment. It’s having an awkward stage where it wants to stay the same but the media landscape has altered very rapidly around it. In this, I will talk about some structural problems and some quality problems that exist with the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I’ll also talk about some barriers to fixing those issues and speculate as to how to circumvent those barriers.

Structural Problems

I don’t really want to get into the history of the Pulitzer Prizes (if you’re interested, I already did a video about its origins). But I do think part of the problem is that the Pulitzer has such a long and occasionally infamous backstory. It’s a prize that is over a hundred years old. While it has done a lot to adapt to changes in technology, media, and society (such as adding a category for audio reporting, which allows podcasts to be eligible), there are, perhaps inevitably, areas where it has growing pains adjusting to modern realities. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction just doesn’t look or function like other major book prizes in 2024.

But that is part of the problem: the Pulitzer Prize isn’t just a fiction prize. It’s not even primarily a book prize at all: there are 23 categories every year, and only 7 are for books. The rest are for journalism, aside from another arts category dedicated to music. The Pulitzer Prize was created to recognize journalism. Its namesake, Joseph Pulitzer, was a journalist. However, he requested that artistic categories be included in part to show the strength of American art on the world stage. Remember, in the early 1900s, the United States was a fairly new country that Europeans often did not take seriously. It had to fight for legitimacy.

Again, we don’t need to get into the history here, especially when I’ve already done that. That’s just to point out that the book awards are only a portion of what the Pulitzer Prize gives out yearly. Arguably, if you start to change how the arts prizes are awarded, it could create conflict with the rest of the categories. Then you end up in a situation like the Academy Awards having an annual stand-off with ABC about whether or not to cut smaller categories like Best Documentary Short from the broadcast. It creates hurt feelings and implies that some categories are more important than others.

I think this is important to note because none of the potential issues faced by the Pulitzer Board have an easy fix. I want to acknowledge that.

However, I think any reasonable person can look at the division of categories and recognize that they fundamentally award different industries when you pivot from journalism to arts. I think it is abundantly clear that the audience for the arts categories is different from the audience for journalism. Journalism is more insular, celebrated by and among people who are journalists. Sure, it also allows bragging rights that might get a newspaper more subscribers, but that’s really just an advertising opportunity. The public probably doesn’t know who won a Pulitzer for Best Breaking News Reporting last year. That’s not to diminish the achievement, what it represents, or how vital good breaking news reporting is; it’s just a fact that the American public doesn’t pay close attention.

There is, however, evidence that the American public cares a great deal about what books win a Pulitzer–especially in the fiction category. If you don’t believe me, look into the controversy that erupted in 2012 when the Pulitzer Board failed to choose a fiction winner (if it’s helpful, I have a video about it). Chief among the complaints from bookstores across the country was how they had been deprived of the sales increase that usually comes with the prize announcement. And this bears repeating: I’ve met many people who, like me, read along with the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and spend a lot of time trying to predict what will win. I’m even in a Discord group dedicated to that.

I don’t want to get in the weeds here, so rather than continue making a case for why there’s a fundamental difference between the journalism and arts prizes, I’m going to assume that we can agree. If you want to debate it, leave a comment.

If we agree, we can talk about how it shouldn’t be a problem for the Pulitzer Board to treat the arts categories differently from the rest of the prizes. It would give these categories a platform they don’t currently have. While I don’t necessarily think the Pulitzer Board should be thinking about competing more directly with other book prizes, it wouldn’t hurt.

Now, you probably think I’m about to advocate for the Pulitzer to revamp the format for its artistic categories to mimic The National Book Awards (which is similar to The Booker Prize and many other book prizes except that like the Pulitzer, the National Book Award has multiple categories for books). That would mean that the Pulitzer should release a longlist, then a shortlist, and finally a winner. I am not actually advocating for that. I like that there’s a significant book prize that keeps you guessing until the moment the award is announced. It makes it exciting! I wouldn’t be opposed to the finalists getting announced ahead of time because there is a strength in that: it gets audiences invested ahead of time. It allows for greater, or at least more prolonged, social media impact–which is a big deal nowadays. I would be okay with it if the Pulitzer did make this change, but I don’t think it’s necessary.

I am thinking more specifically about removing the arts categories from the shadows. The Pulitzer is a very insular and secretive institution. Not only do you not know the finalists before the announcement, but you also don’t know who the jury is. Ostensibly, this is to keep the process honest. It prevents people or publishers from campaigning with the jury members. I think there are two problems here. The first and most damning evidence that this probably isn’t a necessary precaution is the existence of all those other book prizes that announce the jury members months in advance: The Booker Prize, The Women’s Prize, The National Book Awards, The International Booker Prize, etc. They all announce their juries in advance, and (so far) not one of them has been accused of shenanigans. There’s just too much evidence that what they are concerned about is not actually a problem.

The second thing is that if someone wants to believe that a jury was influenced by an author or publisher, keeping their identity secret won’t actually make anyone feel better. When Hernan Diaz tied with Barbara Kingsolver for the Pulitzer, a segment of people believed that he probably had an in with the Board since he works at Columbia University, which administers the prizes. They didn’t dodge any conspiracy theories by keeping the jury secret. Furthermore, are we to believe that authors, critics, or whoever else makes it onto the jury has no connection to the authors whose work they are considering? Of course they have connections! Many writers who have been through MFA programs have even been mentored by notable authors. Paul Harding found out that he won a Pulitzer for Tinkers in his office at the Iowa Writers Workshop and he immediately ran to the office of Marilynne Robinson, another Pulitzer winner who had been his teacher. That’s just an example of authors having connections with each other–Robinson had nothing to do with Harding’s win (although she had been a champion of his work). It’s just to show that authors are connected. Keeping the identity of the jury secret doesn’t get around that, and it won’t convince anyone who believes that the jury is playing favorites.

You know what would actually help show that the jury offered up books that they are genuinely passionate about? Getting them out there to talk about the finalists! Allow them to do interviews about their process and how they settled on these books. Hindering them with an NDA so they can never speak publicly about their task does the opposite: it makes it feel like they have something to hide. The Pulitzer jury is filled with notable literary figures every year, but we don’t get to hear from them beyond seeing the books they recommended as finalists. The only recent occasion we got to hear about the process a jury went through was that controversial year of 2012, when Michael Cunningham went on the record on behalf of the jury to show that they had done what was expected of them. But that only happened because there had been a breach of contract when the Board failed to select a winner.

Allowing the jury to speak about the finalists would generate excitement about the books, and it could be good publicity for the Pulitzer Prize itself. After this year’s announcement, one of my big questions was how the jury settled on those three finalists given all the excellent literature from last year they had to choose from. I might still disagree with their conclusion, but wouldn’t it be nice to hear them speak about those books?

And it would be nice to hear from the Board itself, since the Board has such an essential role in the process. How did we get a tie last year? What made Night Watch stand out from the other finalists this year? Viet Thanh Nguyen and David Remnick are on the Board and I can only assume they have input on the fiction winner, so it’s not like we don’t have Board members who can give a good interview. The silence and the secrecy are deafening.

And I know why the Pulitzer Board is so concerned with secrecy: in the past, there have been very public disagreements between the juries and the Board, between jury members, and among the Board itself. It doesn’t always make the Pulitzer as an institution look good when we know that the Board refused to give a prize at all rather than see it go to Gravity’s Rainbow, which they called obscene. Or that the President of Columbia University, who was a Board member, staged a coup to deny Ernest Hemingway recognition for For Whom the Bell Tolls. Or when jury members and/or Board members quit from their positions in protest when they don’t agree with the selection (or feel indignant that a book they like was passed over). All these things (and more) have happened, making the Pulitzer as an organization look bad.

I don’t think the solution is to shroud the organization in secrecy, binding everyone involved in the process by an NDA so the dirt won’t be revealed. (As an aside, I don’t know that NDAs are involved, but it seems like it would make sense for them to be). I have to believe that it’s possible to run an organization without such flagrant misbehavior. But I do think that’s how we arrived at this point. It’s just that this is not the way things need to be.

And it has to be said, we live in an age of social media. The Pulitzer is losing on engagement compared to other major prizes. It’s nice that they released a podcast offering a closer look at last year’s winners, but that’s not the same. The Pulitzer feels unwilling to accept social media, preferring more old-school methods of reaching an audience. That makes it feel more formal and unapproachable. I’m not suggesting that the Pulitzer should partner with influencers or start posting memes, I’m saying that it wouldn’t hurt for them to pull back the curtain and engage with people.

Removing some of the Board’s power from the process would also be good. The way things stand now, a jury goes through the submissions to select finalists (usually three of them). They hand these finalists to the Pulitzer Board, and a subcommittee of Board members chooses a winner from those finalists (or, if they can’t choose, they may either ask for another finalist or decide not to award a prize at all–or apparently they can allow a tie now). I cannot think of another major prize that has a process like this. Imagine if the Board overseeing the Academy Awards allowed Academy members to vote for Oscar nominees, then either took over the process completely or fully rejected the input from the Academy about who should win. I imagine that part of the reason there has been so much drama between the jury and the Board historically is that this set-up is like an invitation for power struggles and ego trips.

Just let the jury pick the winner!

An added benefit to this would be that there are a lot of conspiracy theories that since the jury can’t pick the winner, they try to game the system by stacking the deck when they choose the finalists. That notion could go in a lot of directions: if you want a lesser-known book or author to win, don’t nominate anything more recognizable or flashy that the Board might gravitate to instead; if you want one of the biggest books of the year to win, pair it with two books the jury would be unlikely to choose instead; and so on. If you want an example of a case where this could have happened, look to 2011. The two biggest books of the year were Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. You could argue that the jury stacked the deck for Jennifer Egan by omitting Franzen from the finalists. Of course, it’s possible that the jury was comprised of anti-Franzen readers. That’s possible, he is a bit of a prickly pear. I don’t know if stacking the deck really happens, but many people believe it does. Regardless, it makes sense that being able to name the winner would allow a jury more freedom to just name the best three American books of the year. No gamesmanship required.

The Board would still oversee the process to ensure that there haven’t been any shenanigans. I suppose they could still be allowed veto power (or at least the opportunity to debate with the jury, which I will discuss more in the next section). But it would give more power to the people who are actually reading all the submissions: the jury.

And maybe that would start getting us more interesting winners again.

Quality Issues

One of the things I find so interesting about following the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is that looking at the winners tells you a lot about what was going on in American society at that time: not just what was happening but what the fears were, what was valued, and, in the negative spaces, what was overlooked (and why).

In the early days of the Pulitzer, we weren’t far off from the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War (not to mention WWI, which was ending as the Pulitzer began, and the Great Depression, which happened toward the end of this period). Rigid social structures and class boundaries were coming down while jobs were moving from farms to factories–society underwent a rapid evolution, and a lot of fiction at the time captured this sense of whiplash experienced by a generation that had grown up in a world that no longer existed (something I think a lot of us can relate to a hundred years later when the Internet has changed so much). The Age of Innocence is probably the best example of this type of literature, but a lot of winners from 1918-1940 capture this sense of cultural displacement between generations.

WWII marks a huge shift in focus. Not only did women become far less likely to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction during this period (Ellen Glasgow won in 1942 and then it was all men until Harper Lee won for To Kill a Mockingbird in 1961), but most of the winners deal with war or government through the end of the 1950s. The 1943 winner, Dragon’s Teeth by Upton Sinclair, is even a spy thriller about fighting the Nazi menace. The Pulitzer Board became very conservative in the face of WWII and, later, the McCarthy hearings–and it shows. Until recently, this was the least interesting period of Pulitzer winners (with a few exceptions, of course). You may have noticed that I haven’t read any Pulitzer winners from this period yet, and this is exactly the reason: most of them don’t look interesting.

In the 1960s, things begin to shift again. As the Civil Rights movement marched on, the Pulitzer began to turn away from ra-ra government propaganda to more considered and even critical looks at American life: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Keepers of the House, and The Confessions of Nat Turner chief among them, capping off the decade with the first Native American to win the prize in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn.

In the 1980s, the Pulitzer’s interest in books that re-examined the American legacy deepened, giving us The Color Purple, Lonesome Dove, and especially Beloved–almost entirely avoiding the Reagan-era excess that defined so much of the rest of the decade.

The 90s was an interesting time for the Pulitzer. You have big-name winners like John Updike and Philip Roth, but most of the awards went to quieter, lesser-known books and authors. Here, you find hidden gems like A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, Martin Dressler, and The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. You see early (perhaps career-defining) recognition for Jane Smiley, Annie Proulx, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

This leads us to that remarkable run of winners in the 2000s, which is hard to define aside from the fact that you can’t really argue with any of the choices. Maybe it’s hard to define because we’re still so close to the decade that we can’t see the forest for the trees yet, or maybe it has something to do with the fact that this time, the Pulitzer refused to react to the prevailing politics of the time. Looking at the winners, you wouldn’t know that this is the decade where 9/11 happened, the United States became mired in a war, the economy collapsed, and political divisions began to widen and become entrenched. Maybe 1990-2009 represents when the Pulitzer started to stand on its own, aiming to recognize literature on its own terms.

And maybe the lackluster winners we’ve seen over the last decade represent an identity crisis. The biggest successes, the ones that are most likely to stand the test of time, are the most obvious winners. All the Light We Cannot See, The Underground Railroad, Trust, and Demon Copperhead were all among the most prominent, most critically rewarded titles of their years. The Pulitzer seems to lose its footing as soon as it strays from that formula. It’s almost as if the Pulitzer doesn’t know what it should be doing anymore.

I should admit, though, that The Overstory was the rare exception of a recent gamble that paid off. In the years since Richard Powers won, his star has risen considerably. That win feels on par with the 90s, when the jury selected something that didn’t necessarily feel obvious but worked.

The 90s actually feels like a good comparison for what the Pulitzer appears to be determined to be right now: a tastemaker. Obviously, the trend varies year to year as the jury changes, but on average the Pulitzer today doesn’t seem to want to bow to public perception. There have been several years where books that were either very popular or well-liked by critics and/or other book prizes were passed over by the Pulitzer in what feels like a deliberate choice on behalf of the juries.

In 2018 the winners of the Booker Prize, Lincoln in the Bardo, and the National Book Award for Fiction, Sing, Unburied, Sing, were not included among the finalists and Less ended up winning. Regardless of whether or not you like Less, I think we can agree that it feels like an odd winner–especially when both Lincoln in the Bardo or Sing, Unburied, Sing were right there.

2022 gave us Honorée Fannone Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. du Bois, Percival Everett’s The Trees, Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads (a Franzen novel that even people who don’t like Franzen novels seem to like), Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, and Lauren Groff’s Matrix. Not one of those books became a finalist. Instead, three largely unknown novels were selected and we ended up with The Netanyahus.

Last year was more of the same. In a year that gave us The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, North Woods, Tom Lake, Absolution, Biography of X, Blackouts, Chain-Gang All Stars, and This Other Eden, we ended up with a divisive shortlist that gave us Night Watch as a winner. It does not compute.

All too often, the Pulitzer seems to be rejecting the very notion of consensus favorites, choosing to tread its own path as if to say “these are the books and authors we think you should be paying attention to.” The results have not been great.

I’m not saying that the Pulitzer needs to align with public perception. Tinkers is the best possible example of a jury pushing the boat out against the tide of publisher marketing, sales data, and critical consensus to recognize a truly worthy book. When you read Tinkers, it absolutely feels like it belongs in the Pulitzer family. But it shouldn’t feel like a single whisp of attention from critics or other book prizes should automatically disqualify a book either.

And I realize it feels a little off to be having this conversation a year after two of the largest books of the year (Trust and Demon Copperhead) tied for the Pulitzer. But I think that year is an outlier, and in my deep dive asking how the tie happened, I speculate that the jury for that year probably didn’t play by the standard rules of engagement that juries seem to adopt these days.

This is a problem that’s more difficult to fix because identifying the best book of the year is a subjective process. In his essay about the experience of being on a Pulitzer jury, Michael Cunningham describes that one of the most difficult things about it is the jury coming together to agree on criteria and standards. To me, this is what the Board’s function should be. Not deciding the winner and lording over the jury. The Board should be a governing body that defines the criteria and standards the jury applies, and it should hold them accountable for following those standards.

It’s also tricky to say how this can be fixed because the Pulitzer is so opaque about what the process entails. I’m inclined to say that maybe there should be more dialogue between the Board and the jury while selecting finalists, but I don’t know to what extent there already is dialogue between them. The jury should, of course, be allowed to meet and discuss submissions without the Board, but there should probably also be discussions with the Board about which titles are being eliminated from the running. That would give the Board oversight to ensure standards are being followed and allow them to gently push back or ask questions about the decisions. Why is this book not being considered? Why this title over this one? Are we overlooking anything? Can we justify these as the best books of the year? It would create clarity, accountability, and responsibility.

Maybe, if we start having those conversations we can start to remove some of the genre bias inherent to major book awards. The Road is the closest we’ve come to a science fiction winner. It’s been over a decade since a collection of linked stories won, and more than twenty years since a traditional short story collection took home the prize. I’m not suggesting that the Pulitzer should eliminate all standards, and it certainly shouldn’t turn into a popularity contest. But there have been great, innovative genre novels over the last few decades that never had a chance with the Pulitzer because traditional literary thinking says genre fiction isn’t serious enough.

And while the Pulitzer hasn’t exactly been bad at diversity, that’s another area that could be improved with a focus on clarity, accountability, and responsibility. We’ve only had two Native American winners and the last time a black woman won a Pulitzer for Fiction was 1988.

It might not fix everything but it would inject some accountability into the proceedings.

Summary

To sum up, I think the Pulitzer Board should treat the arts categories differently from how they manage the categories for journalism. That would allow the artistic categories, like Fiction, to evolve more to meet the modern landscape. I also think the Pulitzer Board should stop acting like a monarch overseeing the arts prizes. Instead, the Board should be more of a hall monitor: providing standards and guidelines to the jury and making sure that those rules are followed. The jury should be given the power to select the winner, but with a system of checks and balances between it and the Board. It should be made clear to every incoming jury that their role is not to be a tastemaker but to reward the year’s best American fiction.

The Pulitzer Prize should also adopt some transparency. Stop being so vague and secretive about how it all works, allow jurors and Board members to discuss their role and their excitement for the winner, and engage with readers. The way it functions right now, the Pulitzer feels like a secret elitist society that would rather dictate what constitutes good literature than evolve, learn, and foster dialogue with readers.

I think it bears repeating that identifying the year’s best book is a subjective process. No book prize will be perfect every year. But when six of the last 13 Pulitzer winners have not been satisfying (not just to me but to other Pulitzer fans and general readers), it indicates that there is a problem. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction deserves a more consistent reputation than that.