The 1945 and 1946 Pulitzer Novel Juries were split on which novel should receive the award, however in 1946 the Jury could not come to a consensus. The John Chamberlain juries of the 1940s were apparently notorious for having unsettled divisions among the jury members. After extensive debate in 1946 they decided not to issue an award (1946 was the first year with no Pulitzer Prize for Fiction since Ernest Hemingway’s controversial snub in 1941 for For Whom The Bell Tolls –feel free to read my reflections on the novel and the Pulitzer controversy here).
The 1946 Novel Jury was composed of the same three gentlemen as in 1945: Orville Prescott, the lead book reviewer for The New York Times; Maxwell S. Geismar, a Columbia alumnus and teacher at Harvard who became a famous literary critic for a variety of publications including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Herald Tribune, The Nation, The American Scholar, The Saturday Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Encyclopedia Britannica and Compton’s Encyclopedia (he also penned a notoriously belligerent critique of Henry James); and John Chamberlain, the Chairman of the Novel Jury and a memorable book reviewer who worked for a host of publications throughout his career including The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Life, Fortune, Scribner’s, Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, and others. He taught Journalism at Columbia University.
Apparently (per John Hohenberg), the Novel Jury in 1946 was split between three books: Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott, a novel about the heroism of ordinary people under Nazi occupation (Wescott was an American expatriate in Paris and was openly gay but today his novels are largely forgotten); The Wayfarers by Dan Wickenden (another mid-century novelist whose novels are mostly forgotten), and Black Boy by Richard Wright (Orville Prescott rejected Black Boy on the grounds that a memoir did not qualify for a Pulitzer Prize in the “Novel” category). The Pulitzer Prize Archive compiled by Heinz-D. Fischer and Erika J. Fischer notes that the 1946 Jury Report is strangely missing in the Pulitzer records at Columbia University.
1946 was also the first year of the Pulitzer Prizes following the retirement of Nicholas Murray Butler, the controversial long-serving President of Columbia University. Butler was succeeded by Frank D. Fackenthal, Secretary and then Provost of Columbia University (1910-1945) who had played a huge role in the early development and launch of the Pulitzer Prizes. Fackenthal would serve as Acting President of Columbia University for several years until 1948 when he was succeeded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower.