The 1970s was a decade of scandal and tumult for the Pulitzer Prizes. There were three years during the decade in which no Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded at all despite the presence of several quality frontrunners (1971, 1974, and 1977). In 1974, all three members of the Pulitzer Fiction Jury publicly expressed “distress and bewilderment” when their unanimous recommendation for Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon was rejected by the Pulitzer Advisory Board. The Jurors were further dismayed when no explanation was given for the rejection. While the Jurors discussed a few runners up, such as John Cheever’s A World of Apples, Gore Vidal’s Burr, or Isaac Bashevis Singer’s A Crown of Feathers, the clear favorite was the young experimental postmodernist recluse, Thomas Pynchon.
The three Jurors in 1974 were Benjamin DeMott (Chairman), a cultural critic with a preference for sociology and a professor of English at Amherst College; Elizabeth Hardwick, a fiction writer and former wife of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Robert Lowell; and Alfred Kazin, a writer and literary critic with a particular focus on the immigrant experience in America. All were distinguished authors and critics in their own right.
Regarding the 1974 snub, the members of the Advisory Board declined to discuss their decision, among them included John Hohenberg, Board Secretary, and Joseph Pulitzer Jr., Chairman of the Advisory Board and grandson of Joseph Pulitzer. However, other members of the 14‐member board described Gravity’s Rainbow in private as “unreadable,” “turgid,” “overwritten” and in parts “obscene.” One member said he tried hard but had only gotten a third of the way through the 760‐page book. Another member of the Board, Vermont C. Royster, contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal, later told The New York Times: “I don’t know whether it reflects on the quality of the fiction or the quality of the judges.”
Note: Joseph Pulitzer Jr. was the grandson of Joseph Pulitzer, founder of the Pulitzer Prizes. Technically, he was Joseph Pulitzer III but he took on the title of “Jr” instead when his grandfather died and his father simply adopted the name “Joseph Pulitzer.” Pulitzer Jr. served on the Pulitzer Advisory Board at Columbia University for 31 years -the last Pulitzer family member to be involved in the prizes. He oversaw a dramatic change the following year in 1975 when the Pulitzer Advisory Board was moved out from under the purview of the Trustees of Columbia to become the principal award granting body.
Pynchon had previously rejected the Dean Howells Medal in 1975 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, penning a terse letter to the Academy: “I don’t want it. Please don’t impose on me something I don’t want.” However, he did later accept a MacArthur “Genius” grant in 1989, and he also accepted the National Book Award (albeit by sending a professional comic named Irwin Corey as “Professor Irwin Corey” to accept the award on his behalf). One wonders what Pynchon might have done had he actually won the Pulitzer Prize.
In James F. English’s book, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Culture, he writes: “A transitional moment, perhaps, was Thomas Pynchon’s notorious acceptance of the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974. At that time, Pynchon was certainly till capable of refusing a major prize outright, as he did in a deliberately ‘rude’ letter declining the Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters “‘I don’t want it. Please don’t impose on me something I don’t want’). A decade and a half later, he showed himself willing to accept such an award with no display of reluctance, as he did the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award in 1989. An ambiguity of position between these two extremes was nicely captured by his handling of the National Book Award, for which he sent the professional comic Irwin Corey to accept the award on his behalf. Corey, in character as “Professor Irwin Corey,’ offered by way of an acceptance speech an incomprehensible amalgam of awards-banquet platitudes, academic jargon, political rant, and pure nonsense, bewildering most of those in attendance at the ceremony and annoying many. This was not exactly a way to renounce the symbolic and material profits associated with the prize. The event increased Pynchon’s specific visibility as an ‘invisible’ recluse writer, thereby augmenting both his celebrity and his special symbolic position as an artist who shuns celebrity (a position he shares with J.D. Salinger). The event also increased the sales of his (academically acclaimed but commercially resistant) novel, enabling an imposition of specially academic preferences on the broader book market. Professor Corey’s appearance also brought visibility and symbolic stature to the prize itself, which by selecting Pynchon as its winner and securing his acceptance (even on comic terms) gained some ground on its originary and ongoing struggle to unseat the Pulitzer as America’s most legitimate book prize –that is, as the prize most closely aligned with the academically legitimated hierarchy of literary value. (The Pulitzer fiction jury had proposed Gravity’s Rainbow as its sole nominee that year, but, in a ‘scandalous’ though amply precedented imposition of its journalistic preferences and constraints, the Pulitzer’s governing board had rejected the jury’s choice, calling the novel ‘obscene’ and ‘unreadable,’ and voting not to award a prize at all.) At the same time, however, Pynchon clearly made the award ceremony a kind of parodic version of itself, a false or pretended exchange, a simulation of consecration, an event which, however well it succeeded in accomplishing its purposes, could not quite be taken seriously. His tactics thus suited the postmodern circumstance of the prize –its paradoxically increasing effectivity and decreasing seriousness– as well as prefiguring the whole range of mock prizes, antiprizes, and flippant pseudo-prizes which have symptomatically come to shadow and even to merge with the prize industry proper” (223-224).