The year 2012 was a tremendously controversial moment for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It quite literally rocked the literary world since 2012 was the first year since 1977 that no award for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was issued, despite the three Fiction Jurors offering a trio of quality recommendations to the Board (previously in 1977 the Pulitzer Board denied Norman MacLean the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir, A River Runs Through It). The Pulitzer Board’s denial of a Prize to anyone in 2012 came at their annual press conference in April 2012 and was met with surprise and dismay. It was the first time in 35 years the Board decided to not issue a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. What’s more, the Board has continued to maintain secrecy about its deliberations, a long-standing tradition of the Pulitzer Prizes.
The three Fiction Jurors in 2012 were: Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours which won the Pulitzer in 1999; Maureen Corrigan, book critic on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and a professor of English at Georgetown University; and Susan Larson, the former book editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune and host of “The Reading Life” on NPR.
After initially being selected for the Pulitzer Prize Fiction Jury, the three jurors read the Pulitzer Prize guidelines which Michael Cunningham called “gratifyingly loose.” In his words, “the winning book, be it a novel or short-story collection, must have been written by an American, and should, ideally, be in some way about American life.” With this in mind, the jurors spoke about their shared mission (despite living in different cities). Michael Cunningham said, “in June of 2011, Maureen, Susan, and I made a few fundamental agreements that had, surely, been made by other juries in the past. We would not favor writers for their obscurity (who doesn’t love an undiscovered genius?), or penalize them for their exalted reputations. We would tend to favor the grand, flawed effort over the exquisitely crafted miniature. We preferred visionary explorers to modest gardeners, and declared ourselves willing to forgive certain shortcomings or overreachings in a writer who was clearly attempting to accomplish more than can technically be done using only ink and paper.”
The three Fiction jurors sifted through some three hundred novels and short story collections. While approaching the task from different perspectives, they were able to find common ground among the many novels by narrowing it down to three finalists before confidently sending them along to the Pulitzer Board for final approval. The nominees in 2012 were: David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King; Denis Johnson’s turn of the nineteenth century western, Train Dreams; and Karen Russell’s debut novel about an eccentric Southern family, Swamplandia! As has become standard practice by now, the jury submitted the three novels without prejudice or favoritism so that the Board could make the final decision. If they were unsatisfied with the three submitted novels, the Board had the power to request a fourth possibility –but, as Michael Cunningham noted in a particularly revealing duo-collection of articles in The New Yorker, “no such call was made.”
And then the books started arriving for them to read in batches of thirty at a time. Many were easily dismissed and others were praiseworthy or charming, but not worthy of a prestigious prize like the Pulitzer. They each kept a list with thee arrival of each box of thirty books, presenting their list of “keepers” to one another. As they continued to communicate with each other, via phone and email, the top choices began to emerge –particularly David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.
On behalf of the three jurors, Michael Cunningham further stated:
“We were, all three of us, shocked by the board’s decision (non-decision), because we were, in fact, thrilled, not only by the books we’d nominated but also by several other books that came within millimetres of the final cut. We never felt as if we were scraping around for books that were passable enough to slap a prize onto. We agreed, by the end of all our reading and discussion, that contemporary American fiction is diverse, inventive, ambitious, and (maybe most important) still a lively, and therefore living, art form.”
Generally speaking, the deliberations of the Pulitzer Prizes are kept confidential, however the three Fiction Jurors in 2012 publicly declared their disappointment in a New Yorker article penned by Michael Cunningham. Perhaps one day, years from now, we will learn the whole truth behind the 2012 Pulitzer Prize decision.
Here is a link to Michael Cunningham’s full New Yorker article on his Pulitzer Jury experience. It offers an essential glimpse behind the curtain of the ever-elusive Pulitzer Prizes, especially for those of us Pulitzer geeks: