Writer: Edith Wharton

From LitHub on January 25, comes Edith Wharton’s groundbreaking Pulitzer was originally meant for Sinclair Lewis.

...Robert Morse Lovett—a juror for the prize—revealed that despite Wharton being “one of our best artists in prose,” the jury had tried to choose Main Street by Sinclair Lewis for the Pulitzer. Yet here was the problem: the Pulitzer Prize for a novel was originally meant to be awarded to “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.” Main Street’s satire of small-town life was too biting to be “wholesome”; it sent up the conformity of American life, rather than ascribing it value. So the Pulitzer board—likely led by Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University—chose to award the prize instead to Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, a social story set in 1870s upper-class New York City.

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...But Wharton doesn’t let her characters, or the machinations of New York City high society, off the hook. When she learned she had received the Pulitzer—and thus The Age of Innocence had been categorized as “wholesome”—she mused that the committee must have misread her work.

I did not read Age of Innocence until prison. Maybe the wholesomeness came from the novel being set in the past. Far longer in my past is my reading of Main Street. I am not sure which was harder on its characters.

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1/29/22