The Wealth (and Poverty) of Nations

In 1931, Pearl S. Buck, who would later become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, published the first book of a trilogy. It was called The Good Earth. In 1932 it became the 14th novel to win the Pulitzer Prize. It has retained its popularity better than many other early winners, even making a return to the bestseller list in 2004 when Oprah Winfrey added it to her famous book club.

Settle For Nothing

Thank you to the Pontiac Public Library in Pontiac, Michigan for keeping in its collection a copy of Margaret Ayer Barnes' novel, Years of Grace. Ms. Barnes' novel is the thirteenth novel to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and I loved every single minute that I spent reading all 581 delicate pages of it.

#12: Laughing Boy

No wonder people loved Shirley Temple movies so much. Clearly the best literature of the 1930s was just straight up bleak. I am so ready to read a story about something happy happening to anyone. Even a happy dog would be great at this point. But alas, following in the tradition of really depressing Depression Era books, Laughing Boy steps up to the plate to send us one step closer to just saying "screw life. what's the point!?" This time, our sad and soon to be miserable character is a young man of the Navajo nation who is just starting out his life as a grown man.

What You Don't Know Can't Hurt You

The twelfth book to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is Oliver La Farge's 1930 novel about a traditional Navajo man, Laughing Boy, who falls in love with an American-educated Navajo woman, Slim Girl. Named for its main character, Laughing Boy was the first novel about Native American life to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I enjoy stories about pioneers, Native Americans, and life in the West. Larry McMurtry's epic Lonesome Dove (which received the Pulitzer in 1986) remains my favorite book by an American writer and I first read it more than ten years ago. So I had high hopes for this novel. It did not meet them.

Scarlet Sister Mary # 11

I am always eager to read a book that has previously been banned. Of course there is the rebellious side but there is also an intense curiosity to see just what was the big deal?  Well in that regard, this book certainly did not disappoint. Scarlet Sister Mary is a scandalous story of a woman who dared to not only have sex with whomever she pleased, but she was also brazen enough to proudly bear the children of her affairs and parade them around her community without shame or excuse. It is an awesomely daring story-line for a book published in the late 1920s. Of course the extremely heavy hand of Southern-style Protestantism makes it all better in the end, but that was to be expected.

But onto the historical significance of the book... This book disproves a very controversial sentiment held by many about the existence of "African-American Literature."  To quote a reader from GoodReads.org (speaking about Toni Morrison's Sula):

Scarlet Sister Mary

The eleventh book on our list is 1929's prizewinning Scarlet Sister Mary, by Julia Peterkin. It's the story of a fiercely independent young black woman in the post-slavery coastal south who lives her life outside the moral expectations of her community. She gets pregnant before she gets married, then she marries the wrong man, and after he leaves her she has a bunch of kids with a bunch of different men and never feels too badly about any of it. She has something like nine or ten children, some with men who were one night stands. She's a pretty sexually independent character for the 20's.

The Bridge Is Love

Thornton Wilder's acclaimed novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey is the tenth book on our list, the tenth book to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It is a book that asks a very difficult question - a question that many human beings asked before he wrote the book, and one that they will continue to ask for years to come.

Why do we die?