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The First Pulitzer

514 views 0 replies 1 participant last post by  barryem 
#1 ·
I accidentally posted this in the wrong forum so I hope it's okay to repost it here.  I sure won't mind if the one in Book Bazaar gets deleted. :)

A few years ago I read an article that discussed the origin of the Pulitzer Prize and it made me curious.  I looked up the early fiction winners and found a lot of things I'd heard of but hadn't yet read, so I started gathering them up and reading them.  And I found some wonders!  Edna Ferber's "So Big" was one I hadn't read although I'd read quite a few of hers.  Her books were always pretty good or better but "So Big" was just amazing.  As I recall it was the fifth novel to win a Pulitzer.  Tarkington's two early winners were also superb.

But the very first one to win, Ernest Poole's "His Family" was one I couldn't find in digital form.  I'd look from time to time and then suddenly, a few months ago, there it was.  I bought it and somehow it took me a while to get back to it.

Well here I am, back to it!  I'm a little past the 80% mark now and Wow!  This deserved to be the first.

The book was published in 1916, pretty much in the middle of World War 1.  It begins a bit before that and is about a well to do New York family; a father and his three grown daughters.  His wife had died when they were young.

The thing is, for nearly the first half of the book it's not really about anything.  Just nice people living their rather normal and successful lives.  Still, they all become so vivid and real and they're all so very different and unusual in their own ways, that there's no feeling that it's a slow book.

And then suddenly everything changes.  It never becomes an action book.  There's never any action although behind the scenes there's a lot going on.  But the depth of the drama is intense and the drama keeps increasing.  Not tension.  Not suspense.  Just drama.  Just the sense of being involved in human and family life.

I always think I should wait till I've finished a book that I want to write something about but when I wait I never write it.  I really want to make people aware of this one.  It's an all but forgotten book and it deserves to be remembered.  It began the Pulitzer and the Pulitzer should be proud of such a beginning.

Barry

 
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