American literature can survive Google
On my Crazy, Stupid, Reading Challenge (no relation to the movie)
Since elementary school, I have considered myself an “Aspiring Writer,” which was exacerbated with the literary sensation of Eragon encouraging a world of fellow “aspiring” young writers with its authorial narrative of writing a book at 15 and publishing it by 19.
I have now hit 30 with the moniker of “Aspiring Writer” still appended to my self-stylization, and I am feeling pressed upon by the question asked by Langston Hughes: What happens to a dream deferred? Throughout my 20s, I talked myself out of a number of pursuits in the name of feasibility, time allowed, exhaustion, and a generalized anxiety disorder. But I want my 30s to be a period of enactment.
The Pulitzer Prize is more useful than meaningful.
- Annie Dillard
Now, let me back up and pick up another thread to twine together with my path toward becoming a realized writer.
For several years now, I have been interested in reading the Pulitzer Prize. As a Queer Southern millennial liberal, I have spent a lot of time ruminating on my thoughts about what a piece of art that locates all of these identities would look like.
(This is not to discount the many who have done or are doing this work. Authors like Brandon Taylor, Saeed Jones, and Catherine Lacey. And, to give credit to forebears, Carson McCullers, Dorothy Allison, Rita Mae Brown & Fannie Flagg, Truman Capote, and Alice Walker. This is just to say that it feels imperative of me that a story I tell would need to honor these traditions.)
The aesthetic journey of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, since its founding in 1917, is fascinating. At its inception, the board gave its founding ethos as “for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood [italics my own].”
Two things to note here: First, a semantic commentary on the use of the word “manhood” instead of a broader “humanity” although this must not have been too big of a hurdle as by 1921 the board had awarded Edith Wharton over Sinclair Lewis. Which brings me to my second point and a quick quote from Lewis’s letter on his decision to decline his 1926 win:
This phrase [the prize’s founding statement], if it means anything whatsoever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment.
What Sinclair Lewis was reacting to, and what both cost him the 1921 awarded and also baffled Wharton upon her receipt of it, was the use of the word “wholesome” in the statement. This word itself was antithetical to Joseph Pulitzer’s original wording in his will, which used the word “whole” instead. This meant that for the first decade of the prize, the award must be given to a novel that contained a moral value for American life. Following the criticism of Lewis in 1926, the prize board adapted the wording to use Pulitzer’s originally intended “whole” to amend the statement to ““for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the whole atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood [italics my own]” (information based on the earlier article + the Wikipedia article on the prize, which cites its source as this book).
Over time, the mission statement changed further, normally amended to match with whatever they were interested in nominating:
1929: “present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood” became simply "preferably one which shall best present the whole atmosphere of American life" (this was likely due to blowback regarding the year’s winner Scarlet Sister Mary)
1936: “for an American novel published during the year, preferably one which shall best present the whole atmosphere of American life” became a more all encompassing “"a distinguished novel published during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life" (an interesting change as they had already awarded Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth four years earlier)
1948: “an American novel” became “distinguished fiction published in book form” (which allowed the jury to give the award to Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific)
2023: The author eligibility was expanded as follows: "Authors and musicians are eligible to enter their work if they are U.S. citizens, permanent residents of the United States, or if the United States has been their longtime primary home.” (interestingly, the statement specifies that the book must still be published first in English in the United States)
In the development of my reading plan, these statements of intent (especially prior to 2023) and their impact on the prize led me to initially prioritize only winners. It has long seemed to me that the prize board (because the process for evaluating and determining winners and finalists for the Pulitzer is as convoluted as the mission statement wording) is often willing to nominate daring works but the award itself still tends to go to more straight ahead depictions of American life (the past two years have been great examples of this, in my opinion, as were years like 2002 and 2015).
Read, read, read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!
- William Faulkner
As this reading project was finally starting to solidify, The Atlantic threw a wrench in things with their author-sourced list of “The Great American Novels.” (If you are also at your free trial limit, the list can be viewed on Goodreads here without the author commentary.) Suddenly, what it meant to try to determine an “American” novel became explosively expanded, and if I was going to read from this list, did it also mean that I had to read from the National Book Award, and if I was going to read the National Book Award, what other lists did I have to take in to make sure I was being inclusive? (You can start to see the earlier anxiety I talked about.)
In stepped my closest reading community: my group chat with the wonderful @nosferatoos and @michelbecky on Instagram. Often my voices of reading reason, they helped me to give sense and scope to the project. First, through our conversations of what the “American” novel is in the 21st century after the dawn of the internet and 9/11 (more on this in my next post), they helped me to refine the project to focus specifically on the past 25 years of literary publication (2000 - 2024, so far) instead of the 107 years since the first Pulitzer award. Second, they helped me to define my sourcing for titles:
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners and finalists,
Books cited in the Atlantic article above,
National Book Award for Fiction winners,
Books from 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (all editions) that were published by American-born authors,
And, to round the list out with some more genre fiction and what Faulkner might have called “trash” (read as “popular literature”), American-authored titles from LitHub’s best of the 2000s and 2010s and their yearly compilation of the best rated books from 2020 - 2023.
If you are interested in the list or in engaging with the challenge yourself, here is a link to make a copy of the Google Sheet reading checklist for yourself!
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut… If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.
- Stephen King
This is the project that will comprise the bulk of this newsletter as I examine this weird period we’re made to inhabit known as the 21st Century. Posts will examine individual decades, discuss books from the list in the context of each other and in the context of other media they’re conversing with, review content read in pursuit of the project, and engage with spin-off projects that result as a consequence of the lists.
And all of this will be in service to my own writing, which I hope to place and create in conversation with this project of “21st Century America” - whatever that may come to mean to me. So you can also expect snippets of creative fiction and nonfiction - hold me to that!
At least from the outset, this space is a way for me to process thoughts, so it is not the kind of formalized, well-versed space of critique that I would want to require payment for folks to access. (TL;DR: No paywall on posts.) However, I am a poor little teacher, so I welcome subscription as a means of showing your support for me on a more personal level. If that holds interest to you, consider subscribing below for $5/month or $50/year:
What book would you say matches what living has meant to you best?
Until next time, this has been a dispatch from The Worst Century.