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.