The Yearling

The 1939 Pulitzer was awarded to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings for her novel, The Yearling. It's a coming-of-age story about a young boy named Jody Baxter who lives in the back country of Florida not long after the Civil War has ended. Jody is the only child of Ory and Ezra - more commonly called Penny - and they are a modest, honest, hardworking threesome. His age is never explicitly stated, but I'd guess he's about 12 years old.

We follow Jody over the course of a pivotal year of his life during which he has many mini-adventures and several larger ones. His relationship with his father is the most important human relationship in Jody's life, but it his relationship with Flag, the baby deer he adopts and raises as a pet, that is the book's central emotional focus. Jody has a deep love of living things, most likely inherited from his father. The Baxters kill a great many living animals, but they do it respectfully and judiciously and only in order to sustain themselves. No part of any animal killed for its meat is wasted. No animal is killed inhumanely. At one point when a wolf pack is ravaging the area, Penny Baxter balks at his rough and tumble neighbors' - the Forresters - plan to poison the whole lot, clearly thinking that poison is both inhumane and unsportsmanlike, even for the terrible wolves.

Thematically, this book is closely related to some of my favorite books of all time, Where the Red Fern Grows and The Little House on the Prairie books, but I just can't love it the way I love Wilson Rawls' tale of adventure and love between a young boy and his hunting dogs in the Ozarks, or Laura Ingalls Wilder's stories of life on the wild prairie. For one, The Yearling is much too long. At 500 pages it's a daunting read for adults, let alone children - its primary audience. Perhaps that wasn't true in 1939 when it was written, but it is true today. Its length would be less discouraging were it well used, but young Jody doesn't even acquire his yearling until almost a third of the way through the novel.

Like many a "classic" bildungsroman I've read before, often the story felt repetitive - Jody and his father go to a place, get into some trouble, get out of the trouble, and go home, only to wake up the next day/week/month to go to another place, get into some more trouble, get out of some more trouble, and go home, and so on, ad nauseam, ad infinitum. If the story were more focused and included only the more signifcant events - Fodder-wing's death, the slaying of Old Slewfoot, the devastation of Grandma Hutto's home, and Jody's final and most heartwrenching adventure - it would have been a much better and more emotionally resonant story.

Which brings me to Jody's final adventure: the death of Flag. Even knowing nothing of the plot, I knew before starting this book that of course Jody would be permanently separated from the yearling in the end, either by death or the animal's return to the wild. I did not expect their separation to be quite so traumatic, given that the novel is a children's book. Once Flag becomes a yearling his wild nature overcomes all of Jody's training to domesticate him. At planting time he tramples the money tobacco crop, and twice eats the delicate green shoots of the corn crop despite Jody's best efforts to build a fence to keep him out. Faced with a winter of starvation if they cannot keep their crops, Jody's father reluctantly agrees with Ma Baxter that Flag must be killed. And then he asks Jody to do it.

I know. It's horrifying.

Obviously Jody is heartbroken and feels betrayed by his beloved father's request to kill the thing he loves most in the world, and he can't do it. When the animal returns once more to snack on the budding crops, Jody's parents become desperate to save their food supply and his mother ham-handedly shoots Flag, wounding him severely but not killing him. Jody chases his frightened pet and - through a waterfall of tears - deals the final blow, watching the life leave Flag's eyes as his heart breaks into pieces. He then runs away, determined to leave his hated parents behind forever, and after several days in the wilderness without food he comes to understand what starvation would have meant for their family and how serious Flag's seemeingly-innocent snacking truly was.

An adult reader of the story can see the justification of Flag's killing before Jody does, but it just seems too harsh, too cruel a lesson, and out of sync with the rest of the relatively lighthearted story. I'm a total crybaby when it comes to books - embarrassingly so - and I was too shocked to cry at the end of this story. Instead I felt anger that Rawlings would choose such an ending. I will not recommend this book to children, the ending is just too mean.

So this brings me to the end of the 1930s, and the start of a new decade of Pulitzers. In the 1940s eight novels received the Pulitzer Prize, including works by John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, and James Michener. I hope it's a good decade. An easier decade than the 1930s.

The Late George Crapley, er, Apley

In 1938 the twentieth Pulitzer Prize went to John P. Marquand's fake biography, The Late George Apley.

This book is, without exception, the worst book I've ever read in my entire life. It took me a YEAR to get through it. It was so boring I could only manage five pages at a time before falling asleep, and that also made it easy to choose every possible activity over reading this book. "Hm, well, I could read some more of my book, or I could get a triple root canal. Root canal it is!" My tall boyfriend took to calling this book "The Late George Crapley" because all I could talk about was how shitty it was. I'd crack the spine in bed at night and he'd turn to me and say, "Goodnight!" knowing that I'd be sound asleep within ten minutes.

The book is a fictional biography about a man from Boston named George Apley. The book's narrator is a friend of the deceased who has decided to write the story of Apley's life, and to do so he almost exclusively uses excerpts from letters of Apley's, as well as letters from his various friends and family members, while occasionally injecting his own comments about the subject. Had Marquand dropped the epistolary device and just written the story of Apley's life, it would undoubtedly have been a substantially better novel. It shares themes similar to Margaret Ayer Barnes' Years of Grace, or His Family, by Ernest Poole. And the themes are serious - family tradition, obligation, honor, free will, technological advancement - but the epistolary approach keeps the reader at a substantial distance from the novel's characters. I never felt invested in any of their lives, I never felt like I knew any of them well at all, and as a result I just didn't care and felt perpetually bored. It didn't help that Apley is a stuffy snob from Boston's old money, either.

All in all, this is not only the worst Pulitzer winner I've read so far, it is the worst book I've ever read in its entirety. Normally, when I hate a book this much I don't finish reading it. But I stuck with this one because I knew that if I quit, I would never be able to say that I've read every Pulitzer Prize winning novel.

I won't lie, it felt good to finish it. There's something to be said for perseverance. On to The Yearling. Happy New Year!

Gone With the Wind

At long last I've come to the first Pulitzer-winner that I'd read prior to beginning this challenge: Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchell's classic occupied a good chunk of the summer that I turned 13 and now that I've read it a second time I admit there were vast portions of it I didn't remember at all. Perhaps my original memory of the book has been eclipsed by the movie, but it's also possible that I skipped over entire sections - the spine of my 21-year old paperback copy was suspiciously pristine. I vividly remembered the first 40% of the book and the last 10% but the middle part was a bit foggy. I believe this may have improved the experience of re-reading the nineteenth novel to win the Pulitzer, since I got to see it with fresh eyes.

Honey in the *&%@)#! Horn

I must express my deepest and most heartfelt congratulations to H. L. Davis for the accomplishment that is his 1936 Pulitzer-winning novel, Honey in the Horn. It is officially the worst book I've ever read. And I've read a lot of books, so that's really saying something. Congratulations, sir!

Now in November Rain

In the 1930s, six women were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction - more than in any other single decade. (Especially the 1950s when every award went to a man.) Josephine Winslow Johnson was the fourth lady of the decade to take home the prize, in 1935, at the tender age of 24. Now in November was her first novel. It is the tragic story of a middle class family that returns to a long-forgotten farm to attempt to make new a life after the Great Depression has driven them into poverty. It is perfectly written, quietly yet powerfully feminist, and is a beautiful - if sad - story of what it meant to be a Depression-era woman living in poverty.

#16 Lamb in his Bosom

When I first read this book, I was extremely pregnant and confined to my bed. Cean, the main character, is a supreme force of womanhood in every possible sense of the phrase. Reading about this busy and industrious mother-of-many while laying flat on my back made me feel supremely lazy. The level of energy and labor it takes to run a rural household is not for the faint of heart. Despite being a big fan of all the shiny appliances of modern convenience, I was definitely intrigued by the mundane details of her day to day existence. The process of watching a big girl turn into a little woman with a home of her own was fascinating. Imagine a world without Wal-Mart or Target where every piece of your household has to be furnished from scratch and often needs to planned months ahead of time to keep everyone properly clothed and fed. Never mind the tedium of washing clothes by hand; She had to MAKE the clothes too. Most would be crushed by the pressure but her motivation against procrastination was... death.

Sweet Sixteen

In 1934 Caroline Miller became the first Georgian to win the Pulitzer Prize with her novel Lamb in His Bosom. While it's better known than some other early winners, it's not widely known by modern readers. I'm not especially surprised at its relative obscurity, after all, Margaret Mitchell's epic 1937 winner, Gone With the Wind, was destined to outshine many of its counterparts for a long time to come. The Wikipedia entry about Lamb in His Bosom is 65 words long. The entry for Gone With the Wind is 10,665 words!

Set in rural Georgia, the novel tells the story of a poor family eking their living out of the land around them in the two decades leading up to the Civil War. They are modest people, God-fearing, largely uneducated, they don't own slaves (not because of a moral objection, but because they are poor), and they're mostly oblivious to the larger world around them. Their attention is focused on their land, their children, their chores, and their lifelong family drama. I enjoyed this book a lot. You should read it.

#15: The Store

Picture it: America, Post-Civil War. The slaves have been freed, the south has been reconstructed, and freedom is ringing throughout the land. Right? Well, not exactly. Someone with a sense of humor might have titled this book "Now, do you get it?" as  means of completely summing up why slavery only freed the slaves on paper and why the United States absolutely needed The Civil Rights Act to be written and passed. It also gives us 20th century readers a startling look back at what it meant to be a free Black man or woman in the south after the war and some much needed insight on what institutional racism is and how it can completely shape a person's destiny no matter how hard they try to overcome it. It is worth noting that this book provided no heroes or easy solutions and honestly, no hope. In short, it was pretty much exactly the opposite of The Help. (which is a good thing)

Yes, this unassuming little book, The Store by T.S. Stribling did all of that. And it was also a really gripping story.

No Country for Black Men

In 1933 Thomas Sigismund (T.S.) Stribling reluctantly accepted the fifteenth Pulitzer for his novel, The Store. According to the Encyclopedia of Alabama, "Stribling was apparently so unimpressed with the award that he showed it to his wife once and put it in the attic, never to examine it again." Sadly it seems that America has also put Mr. Stribling's novel in the attic. Its fade into obscurity is unfortunate because everyone in the United States - and I mean everyone - ought to read this book.

The Store is the second book in Stribling's Vaiden Trilogy. Set in northern Alabama in 1884, the story deals with Colonel Miltiades Vaiden and his ascent back into the middle class. The South's loss of the Civil War and the subsequent end of slavery cost him his trio of professions as: an overseer on a cotton plantation, an officer in the Confederate Army, and a leader in Ku Klux Klan. (So obviously, he's a *gem* of a guy.) Colonel Milt and his homely wife, Ponny, who he generally holds in contempt and treats with disdain, have fallen on hard times; yet he refuses to accept any personal responsibility for his lowered position, choosing instead to blame others at every turn.

The major action of the novel surrounds Miltiades' dubious decision to steal cotton from his employer, Mr. J. Handback, and the calamitous series of events that follows the theft. Due to a decades-old business transgression of Mr. Handback's against his family, Milt felt entitled to the cotton he stole and the money it brought. He felt it was owed to him. He did not, however, feel compelled to share the spoils with his siblings, who were arguably equally wronged by Handback's past shady dealings. In the same way it was obvious to the reader that Mr. Adams' theft of the glue formula was absolutely wrong in the previous Pulitzer-winner Alice Adams, so too is it obvious that Colonel Milt's appropriation of Mr. J. Handback's cotton is wrong.

Miltiades Vaiden is a terrible person. Here is a list of some of his more reprehensible qualities and actions in The Store:

• He's racist.
• Years ago he raped a black slave woman named Gracie. The regret he feels at the memory of the rape is not due to the fact that he knows that rape is morally wrong, but rather that he degraded himself by sleeping with a black woman. Because...
• ...he's racist.
• He treats his wife, Ponny, terribly. He only married her hoping her father would die and leave his money to her. Which doesn't happen.
• Prior to marrying Ponny he was engaged to another woman, Drusilla, but before ending their engagement he made sure he slept with her first.
• At the end of the book, after Ponny has died in a most pitiful fashion, he marries Drusilla's daughter, Sydna, who is 30 years his junior, despite having once slept with her mother and the fact that his own nephew is terribly in love with her.
• He steals a bunch of cotton from J. Handback and sells it for a sizable sum of money.
• He coerces Gracie (yes, the woman he once raped) into hiding the money for him, without any consideration for the great personal risk she is taking in aiding him in the crime. Why would he give her any consideration? After all, she is black, and a "Vaiden negro," and somehow bound to him because she served his family as a slave back on the plantation WHERE HE RAPED HER. Because...
• ...he is really racist!
• Later, when he is in a tight spot financially due to his own poor money management, he seeks to deprive his black sharecroppers (Gracie again. And her son, Toussaint, who is actually his son, because he raped her!) of their tools so that he can sell them to make some quick cash, knowing full well that losing their equipment will prohibit their ability to harvest their crops, and therefore impoverish them. Which he really doesn't care about, at all.
• Because he is really, really racist.

All of the white people in this novel, with the important exception of one, are unapologetically racist. As bad as Milt is (and clearly, he's pretty bad), there are people who are even worse. Stribling's white characters fall along a continuum of racism, and it is depressing to see how few people are on the right end of that continuum. The lone non-racist, Postmaster Landers, is not a natural born Southerner, but a transplant from the North, his position was a political appointment. He is not well-liked by his white peers in town, but in his interactions with Milt (who is at least civil and respectful to him, if not particularly kind) he serves as a sort of psychic, directly predicting for him events that come to pass or providing him with portentous advice.

Landers is set apart, separated from the other white characters by both his slightly supernatural characteristics, as well as his treatment of the town's black residents, whom he treats with genuine equality of heart and mind, and complete compassion. For much of the novel I felt that Mr. Landers' purpose was to provide contrast as the sole humane white man in a sea of racists, I thought he was a symbol of hope. As he fights for Toussaint's life near the end of the novel, he makes an impassioned plea for assistance to Milt's nephew, Jerry:

This passage strikes me as profoundly true. It's so obvious - we are all human beings. And yet as the novel's closing events transpire it becomes clear that rather than serving as a symbol of hope, Landers is just the opposite. He is a sad indicator of how little hope Stribling saw for white Southerners to progress in their way of thinking about and treating black Americans.

There is a lot to ponder about this story, but the single most important takeaway for me was Stribling's basic conclusion that the American South was, is, and always will be a white man's country. At one point the Governor of Alabama, who is also an attorney, says just that in a courtroom where his white client is being sued by a black man, and he's attempting to have the case dismissed because (sarcasm) how could a black man ever have the law on his side if his complaint is against a white man? His characters repeatedly prove that in the post-war South racism was such a deeply ingrained aspect of white culture that it would require generations and generations of conscious, deliberate effort - both personal and political - to eradicate. He made these conclusions in the 1930s, and sadly in 2013 it is all too evident that we've still got a long way to go.

Stribling addresses many other racial themes in this novel, and his black characters represent a wide range of cultural perspectives. I could dedicate an entire second blog post just to that topic! The idea of hypodescent is extremely important to the plot, and if you've never heard of it now's a good time to look it up, as it's basically the way race is assigned in America.

The next novel on the list is set in rural Georgia before, during and after the Civil War. And no, it's NOT Gone With the Wind, not yet. It's called Lamb in His Bosom, by a woman named Caroline Miller. I've actually already started it and am loving it so far. Fingers crossed it stays that way!

Book #14: The Good Earth

The main character is Chinese, a man, and a farmer.  I'm not a pre-revolutionary Chinese man, so maybe I don't know any better, but nothing about the main character's voice in this book "felt" authentic. The world that Pearl Buck created seemed solid and tactile enough, but so many of her characters lacked flesh and realism. Their plights were real but they seemed like cold pieces of colorful construction paper hastily pasted onto a beautiful oil panting. There were some instances where she did manage to bring the character's culture to life. One was, surprisingly, with foot binding.

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?

Book #10: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is one of those "Pulp Fiction" or "Snatch" type of stories where a seemingly unrelated cast of characters with their own random plot lines are all magically connected by one incident. In this case, the incident is the collapse of a bridge in Peru which kills a handful of the area's residents. Author Thornton Wilder careful details out the lives of each victim leading up to the moment of their death. It sounds like an interesting enough premise but it only kinda sorta works.

Book #9: "Early Autumn" aka The House of No Sex

 I can't imagine living in a world where every single one of your life's decision is dictated by the people around you. How you dress, what you eat, how you dance, when you dance, where you dance, with whom you dance, whom you marry, and so on. Each character in this book (and every other Victorian-era novel) seems helplessly bound to societal standards and will sacrifice any hope of happiness or pleasure in an attempt to conform.

Do we live under such standards today in 2012 and we just don't realize it? I would love to say I am a genuine free spirit who is exempt from the expectations of my middle class upbringing but I'm not sure if that would be true.

Early Autumn

I’m starting to wonder if one of the requirements to win the Pulitzer is that the story be unbearably depressing. I finished the ninth winning novel, Louis Bromfield’s Early Autumn, over a week ago and I needed to let it sit for a little while before writing about it. It’s about a bunch of unhappy people. It had an unhappy ending. Mostly, it was a huge bummer. At its center is Olivia Pentland, a beautiful, intelligent, sensitive woman who is married to an insufferable bore of a man. Early Autumn is mostly her story, although it’s also the story of the family she married into.