The Origins of the Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize (pronounced “PULL it sir”) has a fascinating and storied history. Personally, I am excited to read through each winner beginning with the Novel category (later renamed the “Fiction” category post-1948). The Pulitzer Prize was initially established through a provision in media mogul Joseph Pulitzer’s estate when he passed away in 1911. In his will, he left a bequest of $250,000 to Columbia University establishing a series of literary and journalistic awards (Mr. Pulitzer gave a total bequest of $2,000,000 to create a school of journalism at Columbia University, 25% of which was designated for the Pulitzer Prizes). Columbia University then matched Mr. Pulitzer’s bequest with $500,000 the income of which was to be used for the financial awards and scholarships associated with the Pulitzer Prizes. As intended, Mr. Pulitzer’s bequest was to be “applied to prizes or scholarships for the encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education.”

Who Is Joseph Pulitzer?
To quote W.J. Stuckey, “The life story of Joseph Pulitzer, founder of the Pulitzer prizes in journalism, letters, and music, fits beautifully into the familiar pattern of American success.” Mr. Pulitzer was born “Pulitzer Josef” to a Hungarian-Jewish family. His father was a wealthy man –a successful grain merchant. When Joseph was 17 (in 1864) he moved to Boston and became a soldier in the American Civil War. He was drafted into the Union Army but he quickly fled from his recruiter, jumping into Boston Harbor so he could enlist without the recruiter’s bounty. After the war, he briefly worked in the whaling industry and a number of other odd jobs spanning from New York to St. Louis. In one case, Pulitzer was swindled into paying a transportation fee with the promise of a well-paying job on a Louisiana sugar plantation. Angered by the fraudulent situation, he wrote an article and published it in a local newspaper. He also worked as a railroad worker before deciding to study law. In 1867, he renounced his Austro-Hungarian citizenship and became an American citizen. Eventually, he landed a job as a news reporter for a German language newspaper where he excelled –Mr. Pulitzer gradually rose in the newspaper business. He was also successfully nominated for political office by the Republican Party, however, he quickly became disillusioned with Republican corruption and he switched to the Democratic Party.

In 1878, he bought two newspaper companies, eventually merging them into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. By 1883, he was now a wealthy man and he purchased the New York World, a failing newspaper, for $346,000. In order to turn a profit and generate readership he emphasized sensationalism and scandals in its pages, a strategy that improved the paper’s sales but likely didn’t earn it any prestige among more refined circles. Under Pulitzer’s ownership, the New York World became the largest newspaper in the country, even rivaling Hearst’s newspaper, the New York Journal. In 1884, Pulitzer served as a Congressman in the U.S House of Representatives, but he soon quit his term before completion in order to focus on the demands of his newspaper business. Eventually, after decades of spectacular success, the World and its readership gradually declined. It closed down in 1931, long after after Pulitzer’s death.

In his later years, Mr. Pulitzer struggled with depression, blindness, and acute noise sensitivity –yet he refused to relinquish ownership of his newspapers. In 1890, he approached Harvard University with the idea for a philanthropic gift of $1 million to found a new school of journalism but his request was rejected. The same offer was also rejected by Columbia University under the leadership of President Seth Low (whose namesake would ironically serve an important role in the future Pulitzer Prizes through the “Low Memorial Library,” named after his father), however ten years later Mr. Pulitzer managed to convince Columbia’s new president, Nicholas Murray Butler, about this “grand scheme” and “germ of an idea” he had been floating for years. The concept was to dedicate a new school of journalism in honor of Pulitzer’s favorite child, Lucille Pulitzer, who tragically died of typhoid at the age of 17 in 1897. Mr. Pulitzer arranged for an Advisory Board to be appointed by himself to help launch the new school and this board was also designated to manage a nascent collection of awards in Pulitzer’s name. He fashioned the idea after the late Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the Swedish chemist who invented dynamite and who bequeathed approximately 31 million Swedish kronor to the Swedish Academy to fund the Nobel Prizes upon his death in 1896. Along with Alfred Nobel, Joseph Pulitzer was also inspired by his own rival, James Gordon Bennett, who was then in talks to found a school of journalism in support of the New York Herald.

In his waning years, amidst ailing health while on a boat trip to one of his homes in Georgia, Pulitzer made a stop in Charleston, South Carolina. While his German secretary read aloud to him about tales of King Louis XI of France, he muttered “Softly, quite softly” and he gently passed into the night. Joseph Pulitzer died in 1911 at the age of 64, and he left behind some nineteen million dollars, two newspapers, and an extraordinary legacy in the Pulitzer Prizes –a testament to the enduring power of philanthropy.

In his will, which he drafted in 1904, Joseph Pulitzer specified several different awards to be granted by Columbia University, though the one that is most pertinent to my endeavors is the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (1917-1947), later retitled the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1948-Present). Each year, an awardee receives a monetary prize of $10,000 (this amount was increased in 2017 to $15,000). At the heart of the new fiction prize were a number of questions regarding literary excellence, questions that persist to this day –should there be a moral component to the award? Should Pulitzer Prize-winning novels exclude novels from consideration that the board deems immoral? Is the Pulitzer intended to gratify critics or crowd-pleasers? By what criteria should the Pulitzer Prizes be awarded? What is the goal of the prize? Mr. Pulitzer’s initial intent for the Pulitzer Prize was for there to be a fairly simplistic moral component to the awards, however this naïveté would be corrected in time in order to account for revolutionary new forms in literature penned by the American greats like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Lewis (indeed, Pulitzer’s moralism would have surely precluded great works from the likes of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Crane if the awards had existed in the preceding century). Joseph Pulitzer’s initial will stipulated that the prize shall be given “annually, for the American novel published during the year which shall best represent the whole atmosphere of American life, and the highest standards of American manners and manhood.” Before the first year of the awards was launched however, the word “whole” was changed to “wholesome” at the behest of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University (Butler had a notoriously fractious relationship with the elder Joseph Pulitzer during negotiations over his gift). Mr. Butler’s intent was to reinforce a moral criteria to the award. This change from “whole” to “wholesome” led to a panoply of dilemmas during those coming years. In fact, the fluctuation of the term “whole vs. wholesome” occurred throughout the 1910s-1930s, until in 1936 when the award criteria was changed again to honor “a distinguished novel of the year,” and the language of the award was again revised in 1947 when the titular award for the best “novel” was expanded to include “fiction in book form” in order to better accommodate short story collections and novellas.

Mercifully, Mr. Pulitzer’s will was deliberately created at the outset to be flexible with the changing times, allowing future generations to revise the administration of the Pulitzer Prizes as needed. In his will, Mr. Pulitzer gave ultimate authority to the advisory board, endowed with “power in its discretion to suspend or to change any subject or subjects, substituting, however, others in their places, if in the judgment of the board such suspension, changes, or substitutions shall be conducive to the public good or rendered advisable by public necessities, or by reason of change of time.”

Thus, the ‘Plan of the Award’ has been revised from time to time –most recently in 2023 the Pulitzer Prizes announced it would expand consideration to non-American citizen authors, playwrights, and composers who are permanent and longtime residents of the United States (the change will take affect in 2025)– and the number of different awards, from poetry to feature writing, has ballooned to 21 different prizes (as of 2020). Since 1975, the Board of the Pulitzer Prize has made all these official decisions, but prior to 1975, the Pulitzer Board’s recommendations were ratified by a majority vote of the trustees of Columbia University. In other words, it was around 1975 when the Pulitzer Board officially became independent from Columbia University, though it still works closely with the school on everything except official decisions about the prizes. For example, the formal announcement of the prizes, typically made each year in April, states that the Pulitzer Prizes are officially announced by the President of Columbia University on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize board.