1930 Pulitzer Prize Review: Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge

“With you I could live, without you I was already dead.”

Oliver La Farge (1901-1963) was an anthropologist whose research focused primarily on Southwestern American Indian communities, particularly the Navajo. La Farge was an activist, a scholarly writer, and he also wrote short stories published in The New Yorker and Esquire. By far his most recognized story these days is his debut novel, the Pulitzer-Prize winner Laughing Boy published in 1929. A year after winning the Pulitzer, La Farge had a son, Peter La Farge, who eventually became a famous activist folk singer. Unfortunately, Oliver La Farge’s marriage fell apart soon thereafter, but he tried to maintain a close relationship with his son for the rest of his life. Ever a lover of the American Southwest, Oliver La Farge died in New Mexico in 1963 at the age of 61.

Laughing Boy marks a somewhat surprising twist in the road for the early Pulitzer Prize-winners. It is a novel about the struggles of the Navajo people in the early 20th century, told through the voices of two Navajo Indians: “Laughing Boy,” our protagonist who is named for an amusing incident when he was a young man, and his paramour “Slim Girl” (her original tribal name was “Came With War”). They meet at a dance one evening and quickly strike up a romance. However, their relationship is a complicated tapestry. Laughing Boy is raised in a traditional Navajo household, while Slim Girl has been taken away and educated by the white Americans. There is an ongoing tension between the two cultures. Laughing Boy envies her worldliness, but Slim Girl longs to return to her people, she constantly feels like an outsider. Both characters struggle to find a place to belong while the Navajo way of life is under ever-present threat from American encroachment. In some ways, the duality of the two main characters showcases what W.E.B. Dubois called “double consciousness” –they are both aware of their own culture, yet also aware that they do not belong. They are both Indian and American at the same time, and yet they are also strangers to these dual identities.

Laughing Boy and Slim Girl are soon married, but their marriage turns out to be more of an elopement. The traditional people of the tribe do not approve of Slim Girl, and thus Laughing Boy runs away with her to live near the Americans with Slim Girl. He becomes a craftsman, and she a weaver, however she is also hiding a dark secret. Slim Girl has been moonlighting as an escort for the Americans (whom she despises). The Americans bring with them noise, crowds, trains, and whiskey, which is described as a fiery drink akin to a poison. Laughing Boy simply does not belong among these white people. However, when they make periodic return trips to the Navajo community, Slim Girl also feels out of place because she was not raised among their customs.

The underlying anxiety in the novel is Slim Girl’s dark secret –that she has been working incognito as a prostitute– and we are left to wonder when Laughing Boy will discover the truth. The idea of the novel is predicated on the audience possessing this dark foreknowledge, an exercise in dramatic irony. One day, Laughing Boy does find out. He walks past an adobe window in town and sees his wife with a white man. Immediately, the man runs off but Laughing Boy shoots an arrow through the man’s shoulder, but in the scuffle Slim Girl’s arm is also pierced. When she returns home she tells Laughing Boy the whole story –of how she was raised among the Americans, and one man feigned love with her in exchange for sex, but when she became pregnant, he abandoned her, and the “Jesus Trail” (the Christian Church) wholly outcasted her for being a sinner. Slim Girl’s baby then died in pregnancy and the only people who accepted her were the local “bad girls” (prostitutes) so she joined them and learned their ways. Before long, Slim Girl became an escort for one American man from the East who now financially supports her. After hearing her full story, Laughing Boy thinks for a while. He decides to remain together despite it all. They make plans to blissfully build a new home together for themselves in the remote southwest, closer to the Navajo people where they will start a family. En route, “Red Man” ambushes them (Red Man is an American who is envious of Slim Girl’s love for Laughing Boy). He shoots and kills Slim Girl, leaving Laughing Boy to sorrowfully bury her in a canyon alone. It is a somber, tragic end to the tale. After he buries Slim Girl, Laughing Boy stumbles upon another big dance of the Navajo, similar to the dance at the beginning of the book where he first met Slim Girl years earlier. Thus concludes the novel.

La Farge’s insights into the complex nature of love, his presentation of the organic Navajo songs, and his depiction of the vast beauty of the American southwest are all powerful markers of a lovely little book. The reader leaves with a newfound appreciation for the Navajo people and their land. One cannot help but find sympathy with the Navajo people in reading this novel.

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The following passage is an example of why Laughing Boy won the Pulitzer (it describes Laughing Boy shortly after his marriage to Slim Girl):

“Time passing and corn growing cannot be seen; one can notice only that the moon has become so much older, the corn so much higher. With a new life almost more regular than the old, yet far more thrilling, with a rich supply of silver and choice turquoise, with horses to trade and a cornfield to care for, and all the world made over new, time for Laughing Boy went like a swift, quiet river under cottonwood trees. For him, life – which had never been a problem – was solved and perfected, with none of Slim Girl’s complication of feeling that such happiness was too good to last. Had he sat down to T’o Tlakai to compose a song of perfection, he could not have imagined anything approaching this” (opening words of Chapter IX, page 112).

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On the 1930 Pulitzer Prize Decision

After several controversies in prior years, including 1929’s debacle in which Richard Burton (a member of the Novel Jury) publicly praised the unapproved winner before the award could be officially announced by the Pulitzer Advisory Board leading him to depart his role on the jury the following year, the Novel Jury then settled into a consistent three-man group that would judge the award winners for many years to come: Albert Paine (Mark Twain’s literary executor and author of Twain’s authorized biography), Robert M. Lovett, and Jefferson B. Fletcher.

In 1930 each member of the jury supported a different novel for the prize. Fletcher supported Laughing Boy, Lovett supported Mary Lee’s It’s a Great War, and Paine supported Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. Ultimately they settled on Laughing Boy, though chairman Fletcher wrote to the Advisory Board stating: “The members of the committee are not quite in accord, but have individually expressed their willingness [to settle] their differences by voting for Laughing Boy by Oliver LaFarge.” Notably, bombastic Columbia President, Nicholas Murray Butler, once again missed the Pulitzer Advisory Board meeting (for the second year in a row) and so the proceedings were relatively quiet. According to John Hohenberg, Laughing Boy “was not a popular selection. Nor was there any letup in the critical barrage against the Fiction Prize.”

Members of the jury included:

• Chair: Jefferson Butler Fletcher (1865-1946) was born in Chicago, served in the American Field Ambulance Services during World War I, and was educated at Harvard and Bowdoin College. He was a long-serving professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University (from 1904-1939) and was considered a foremost expert on the Italian Renaissance and Dante. In his obituary in The New York Times, it was noted that he served on the Pulitzer Novel Jury for “several years.” Sadly, his son died in an automobile accident in 1926, Fletcher also had a daughter.
• Robert Morss Lovett (1870-1956) was a Bostonian who studied at Harvard. He taught literature at the University of Chicago for many years, he was associate editor of The New Republic, served as governor secretary of the Virgin Islands, and was a political activist –he was accused of being a communist by the Dies Committee which forced him out of his secretary position. He was often on the frontlines of left-leaning picket lines, and helped launch the careers of several young writers, including John Dos Passos. In later years, his wife became a close friend and associate of Jane Addams and the couple lived at Hull House for a spell.
• Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937) was born in Bedford, Massachusetts and grew up throughout the Midwest. He worked as a photographer and became a full-time writer living in New York and abroad in Europe. He became friends with Mark Twain and served as Twain’s biographer and also wrote travel books, novels, and children’s stories. In France, he wrote two books about Joan of Arc which earned him the title of Chevalier from the Legion of Honour.

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Background on the Navajo Indian Nation

The Navajo are one of the great native nations of the American southwest. They reside in Northern Arizona and New Mexico. As a group, the Navajo are believed to have migrated to the Southwest around 1400 from the Alaska/Canada region (and they are likely connected to the Apache, as well). The Navajo oral tradition of songs and story-telling reflect this migration. The Navajo sometimes referred to themselves as the “Diné” (meaning “the people”). Their earliest recorded dwellings existed east of the San Juan River, the extended river that begins in Colorado and flows into the Colorado River in Utah.

The Navajo were a hunter-gatherer group, until they had contact with the ‘Pueblo” tribal group and the Spanish when the Navajo learned to farm and grow corn. The pueblo sought shelter with the Navajo when the Spanish came. When the Spanish came, the Navajo learned to train horses and raise sheep. The Navajo formed a loose alliance with the Spanish and Hopi (between intermittent conflicts) to fight the more violent and aggressive Apache and Comanche tribes from the plains to the north. The Navajo first had contact with the United States during the Mexican-American War in which the United States invaded Santa Fe. The Navajo did not honor a peace treaty with the United States, and after the war, another peace treaty was set to be signed, but famed Navajo leader, Nabona, was killed en route to the signing in 1849. This led to longstanding hostilities. Despite a treaty not being signed, the United States built forts on ancestral Navajo land as a “precaution,” while New Mexico militias, including one led by Colonel Kit Carson that terrorized and raided Navajo villages. In a move reminiscent of genocidal policies in the 20th century, in 1863 the Navajo were systematically attacked, rounded up, and relocated to a barren desert land called “Bosque Redondo.” This process was sometimes called the “Long Walk.” 9,000 Navajo were forced to march to a remote region of the desert with minimal water and supplies -many died of disease, malnutrition, and some simply froze to death in the winter. Internal conflicts ensued when Apaches were also relocated to the same region (Apache and Navajo were enemies). In 1868, a treaty was signed allowing Navajo to return to a federally designated reservation. This reservation remains today one of the largest in the United States

Today, the Navajo are the second most populous Indian nation in the United States.

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Who is Oliver La Farge?

Oliver La Farge (1901-1963) was born in New York City and grew up in Newport, Rhode Island. He was the son of Christopher Grant La Farge, a noted Beaux-Arts architect who designed many church edifices in the New York area, and Florence Bayard Lockwood. His older brother, Christopher La Farge, also became a writer and his grandfather, John La Farge, was a celebrated muralist. The family’s roots could be traced back to Benjamin Franklin.

La Farge received a bachelor of arts degree (1924) and a master’s degree (1929) from Harvard University (he served as editor of The Lampoon). In his second year at Harvard, La Farge joined an archaeological expedition in Arizona. Shortly after graduating, he became an anthropologist studying Native American cultures like the Olmec and Navajo. He married heiress Wanden Mathews (daughter of Edward Roscoe Mathews) and moved to Santa Fe with their two children, but she disliked the region and they divorced in 1937 (The New York Times reported that she was permitted a divorce on the grounds of “cruelty”). He then became estranged from his son, Oliver Albee, who changed his name to Peter La Farge and became a folksinger in Greenwich Village (he later died of a stroke in 1965 likely caused by an overdose of Thorazine, a drug that was introduced to him by Johnny Cash as a sleep aid).

Oliver La Farge then served in World War II, and married for a second time in 1939 to Consuelo Otile Baca with whom he had a son, John Pendaries “Pen” La Farge. Among his many nonfiction books, La Farge wrote a book entitled Behind the Mountains (1956) based on his memories of Consuelo’s family, the Baca family of New Mexico who were ranchers in northern New Mexico. He regularly wrote a regular column for The New Mexican, a Santa Fe newspaper, as well as articles for The New York Times Book Review. Some of his columns were later collected and published in The Man with the Calabash Pipe (1966). He was a lifelong advocate for American Indians and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Anthropological Association, and a member of the Century and the Coffee House Clubs.

La Farge died of heart failure in Albuquerque at age 61 after a failed operation to correct a heart condition in 1963. In The New York Times obituary of La Farge, he was described as “an eloquent champion of the American Indian.” Laughing Boy was his first novel and it was published in 1929. It was dedicated to “The only beautiful squaw I have ever seen in all my life whose name I have forgotten.” And while he wrote the book with an eye toward being as accurate as possible to Navajo ceremonies, rites, and customs, La Farge makes it clear that Laughing Boy is not “meant to instruct nor to prove a point, but to amuse. It is not propaganda, nor an indictment of anything.” Laughing Boy was removed from libraries in Amarillo, Texas and Savannah, Georgia under the charge of being obscene. The year after Laughing Boy was published, La Farge also won an O. Henry award for “Haunted Ground.”

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Film Adaptation:

• Laughing Boy (1934)
  • Director: W. S. Van Dyke
  • Starring: Ramón Novarro and Lupe Vélez

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Literary Context in 1929-1930:

• Nobel Prize for Literature (1929): awarded to German author Thomas Mann (1875–1955) “principally for his great novel, Buddenbrooks, which has won steadily increased recognition as one of the classic works of contemporary literature.”
• According to Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1929 was All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Other books on the list that year included Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis and fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner the prior year, Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin.
• Voltaire’s picaresque satire Candide (1759) was held to be obscene by the United States Customs Service in Boston.
• The Faber and Faber publishing company is founded in London by Geoffrey Faber, with T. S. Eliot as its literary editor.
• Hugo Gernsback first used the term “science fiction” in its modern sense, for his pulp magazine Amazing Stories.
• Scotland Yard seized 13 paintings of male and female nudes by D. H. Lawrence from a Mayfair, London, gallery on grounds of indecency.
• Young philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir became a couple.
• The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice confiscated copies of Samuel Roth’s pirated edition of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses (the first complete edition printed in the U.S.).
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was banned in the Soviet Union due to the interest its author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, showed in the occult.
• The Seven Dials Mystery and Partners in Crime (short stories) by Agatha Christie were published.
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner was published.
• Cimarron by Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna Ferber was published.
• Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe was published.
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque was published.
• Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis was published.
• Passing by Nella Larsen was published.
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway was published.
• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett was published.

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Did The Right Book Win?

In spite of being a charming little work of fiction that successfully sheds light on the struggles of the Navajo people, Laughing Boy is assuredly an amateurish work, especially when considering it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1930 against superior novels like Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms or William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or Nella Larsen’s Passing.

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La Farge, Oliver. Laughing Boy. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., Cambridge, Riverside Press, 1929.