In 1964, there were no award winners of the Pulitzer Prize in the categories of drama, music, and fiction. It was the first time since the prizes first began in 1917 that three separate categories failed to win an award. Upon the annual announcements in the Spring of 1964, publicly members of the 14-member advisory board reported that the Fiction Jury did not offer a single finalist for the award.
The 1964 Fiction Jury consisted of:
- Maxwell S. Geismar (1910-1979) was a Columbia University 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).
- Lewis S. Gannett (1892-1966) was a popular writer and book critic for the New York Herald Tribune. He wrote a regular column called “Books and Things” from 1930-1956. In his obituary in the New York Times in 1966, it was reported that Gannett had reviewed no less than 8,000 books.
In 1964, the Fiction Jury apparently considered a total of ninety novels submitted for the prize, including Norman Fruchter’s Coat Upon a Stick, May Sarton’s novella Joanna and Ulysses, Sumner Locke Elliott’s Careful, He Might Hear You, and John Killens’ And Then We Heard the Thunder. However, the Fiction Jury ultimately recommended that no award be given because “no one of them imposes itself upon us as demanding recognition as ‘distinguished fiction’….” The Board agreed.