1934 Pulitzer Prize Review: Lamb In His Bosom by Caroline Miller

“Cean turned and lifted her head briefly in farewell as she rode away beside Lonzo in the ox-cart…”

Reading through the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels sometimes feels like a long-suffering sacrifice, particularly when it comes to novels like Lamb In His Bosom, the debut novel by Caroline Miller. Published during the depths of the Great Depression, Lamb In His Bosom offers a unique glimpse into the brutal hardships faced by early American pioneers. It was a best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934. The novel was initially discovered by Julia Peterkin who previously won the Pulitzer in 1929 for her novel Scarlet Sister Mary (feel free to read my reflections on Scarlet Sister Mary here). Caroline Miller was the first writer from the state of Georgia to win the Pulitzer, and her success inspired more publishers to seek Southern talent. One such writer was another future Pulitzer Prize-winner named Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With The Wind (feel free to read my reflections on Gone With The Wind here).

At any rate, Lamb In His Bosom was written in the tradition of regional historical realism. Caroline Miller reportedly spent hours cobbling together notes documenting life in South Georgia, and the gradual extinction of its unique culture. Miller was also partly inspired to write the novel based on her own personal difficulties managing a busy household of three young boys. In the novel, Lamb In His Bosom, we are gently dropped into the lives of an oft-forgotten brand of pioneers, a poor but hearty brood of subsistence farmers who once settled the untamed “piney woods” in the wilderness of South Georgia along the Altamaha River. Like the pioneers of the Middle West, the farmers of these untouched southern lands struggle to eke out a life amidst myriad threats: disease, stillborn children, animal attacks, Indian tribes, and so on. They find themselves subject to the cold and unforgiving whims of mother nature, siring numerous children many of whom die in infancy without proper medical treatment. These people are desperate for hope, and ensconced in tragedy, and so they are consequently a deeply pious and highly superstitious group. The novel’s title is taken from the Bible: “He shall feed His flock like a shepherd; He shall gather the lambs with His arm, and carry them in His bosom…” (Isaiah 40:11).

Our protagonist is named Cean (pronounced pronounced “Cee-Ann”) and we begin on her wedding day. She is en route to her new home, a farmstead owned by her husband, Lonzo Smith. Throughout the book she and Lonzo face significant hardship together, from snake and panther attacks, to disease and poverty. Cean bears some fourteen children –each one aging her a little more- and those that survive past infancy cause her great consternation. We meet Cean’s family (the “Carver” family) including the free-spirited Lias and his city-bred wife Margot.

As the novel progresses, Lonzo dies leaving Cean alone on the farm with her many children, but she soon finds new love in an Irish priest named Dermid O’Connor. Meanwhile the men of the inland farms regularly make the 50-mile voyage to the Coast –a cosmopolitan hub of conversation and commerce. However, the men of the Coast are depicted as red-blooded and itching for war with the Northerners. Here, there is talk of “sovereignty” and “states rights” and all manner of justifications for slavery –none of which hold much meaning for rural Georgia farmers like Cean, who only wish they could earn enough money to own slaves. Eventually, Dermid is called up to serve in the brewing Civil War as a Confederate priest, while Cean remains home in order to face continuing tragedy. In the end, Dermid hobbles home from Appomattox so that he and Cean can grow old together.

I had the good fortune of reading a fragile, first-edition copy of Lamb In His Bosom published in 1933, nevertheless I must say I had a difficult time connecting with this novel. There are some beautifully descriptive passages of the rural Appalachian wilderness in Lamb In His Bosom, but the plot leaves much to be desired. This really would have been a much better historical, geographical, or even anthropological investigation rather than a novel. There is simply nothing at stake in Lamb In His Bosom unfortunately. As literary critic W.J. Stuckey notes, “Lamb in His Bosom hardly deserves to be called a novel. It is a grab bag of incidents, purple passages, pious sentimentalizations, and melodrama– all loosely tied together by a chronological thread having to do with the lives of the Smith-Carver clan. The book reflects a certain amount of familiarity with the details of rural life, but little understanding or feeling for the characters or the quality of life described. Indeed, like so many Pulitzer novels, the principal quality –and one suspects the main appeal of this book– is a kind of soap opera wish fulfillment.”

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Notable Quotations:

“Cean turned and lifted her head briefly in farewell as she rode away beside Lonzo in the ox-cart” (1 -opening lines)

“Her eyes swam away to the horizon with soft blue sky set behind it, and soft yellow sunlight falling across it. Blue and yaller, that would be a purty way to make a frock and a bonnet to match” (16).

“Cean’s strength came back so slowly that she thought never would she be well again. Some force of being, some core of courage, had gone out from her on that night when she had born a child, and killed a painter, too. She felt weak as water inside now, and cried for nothing” (155).

“The empty chair was now a cruel reminder that swallowing and breathing can cease, aye, even in one who is as steadfast a surety as the sun. Now they knew he would never eat with them again until they sat down at meat with him in the Glory-World. The thing that separated them was Death, broader than the farthest reach of sky from east to west, deeper than the depths of the Middle Passage to the Old Country, blacker than any night, and more to be feared than any demon in hell” (163).

“…when you have done an evil thing, the only thing you can do is bury it and let it rot away like carrion in the earth” (188).

“Cean would sit on the doorstep in the early evenings and cry. It was a pitiful thing to her for the little fellers to breathe never once, to cry and be hushed in her arms never once, to taste their mammy’s milk never once” (217).

“War talk flamed around the camp fires under the live-oaks at the Coast. As far back as Lonzo could remember, men had talked of war with the North; but now there were stronger arguments for and against War. Now there were hotter heads… He would lean over a trading-counter and listen while some young blood of a planter’s family harangued over states’ rights. There were fire-eaters among these planters, Lonzo thought; they would fight at the drop of a hat. Their eyes flashed and their skins darkened when they recounted some new tale from up North -some runaway slave, mayhap, that was petted and pampered when what he needed was fifty lashes on his greasy back. Rich planters would tighten their fists, wishing for a war so that they could go lick the Northern upstarts who hadn’t learned to tend to their own business. The planters argued that the Negro was well cared for under slavery…” (235).

“How was she to tell her daughters all the things that she had learned, all the secrets that take root in the heart of a woman and grow into evergreen things and put out new leaves as the boxwood does, slowly and faithfully, year by year” (259).

“Lonzo’s death was no great matter to the crops that were planted in his ground; pea-fields blossomed and bore as heavy a hay-crop as ever; as in any past happy year in Cean’s life, corn stretched its brazen-green stalks upward to golden flower-heads” (291).

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On the 1934 Pulitzer Prize Decision

The 1934 Novel Jury did not come to a unanimous decision. First, they recommended a historical novel entitled A Watch in the Night by Helen C. White, followed by a runner-up, Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller, and in third place came No More Sea by Wilson Follett. Disregarding the jury’s top choice, the Pulitzer Advisory Board chose Lamb in His Bosom instead. Frank Fackenthal understandably braced himself for what could have been yet another public scandal, but fortunately it never came. Fackenthal wrote a concerned memorandum to President Nicholas Murray Butler stating: “I am pretty sure we are in for a storm over the Pulitzer Prizes… we ask some literary men to read, for instance, a hundred or more novels in order to render an opinion concerning them, only to have their opinions disregarded by men whose training is not in the literary field.” In response, President Butler simply said: “I’m sorry, but there is no help for it. The Advisory Board is its own master.”

The 1934 Novel Jury was again composed of: Jefferson B. Fletcher (Chair), Robert M. Lovett, and Albert B. Paine. In spite of the Board’s reversal of their decision, Frank Fackenthal was able to persuade this same trio to return again the following year, even though the majority did not appreciate being reversed by the Board (the name of the minority member who carried the day for Caroline Miller was never released, per John Hohenberg).

The three members of the 1934 jury included:

• 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 abut Joan of Arc which earned him the title of Chevalier from the Legion of Honour.

The Pulitzer Prize award ceremony was held at Columbia University on May 7, 1934. When addressing the audience, Caroline Miller said “she felt like Cinderella and that the success of her book seemed like a fairy tale.” When she returned to Georgia she was greeted by a swelling crowd of 2,500 along with a marching band. Miller was hailed as a brilliant writer of the emerging Southern Renaissance. In 1935, Miller was also honored with a French literary award, the Prix Femina Americain. Caroline Miller, who died in 1992, published just one other novel in her lifetime entitled Lebanon (1944). The story of a backwoods girl much like Cean Carver, Lebanon was a commercial and critical flop. Miller blamed its failure on her editors due to the paper shortage during World War II.

As a final note, in 1934 the Pulitzer Prizes faced a public scandal in the Drama category. The Board decided to over-rule the Jury’s selection of Maxwell Anderson’s play, Mary of Scotland. In response, the Jurors denounced the Pulitzer Prizes both in print and radio. It was just one moment among many in which tensions between the Board and jury spilled over into the press (a similar circumstance most recently occurred in 2012 in the Fiction category).

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Who Is Caroline Miller?

Caroline Pafford Miller (1903-1992) was born in Waycross, Georgia, the youngest of seven children, she was the daughter of a Methodist minister and schoolteacher, and never attended college. She married her teacher, William Miller, and relocated to Baxley, Georgia. Together they had three sons, two of whom were twins. During her early years of marriage while raising children Miller wrote short stories. During this period she wrote Lamb In His Bosom and it surpassed all expectations, garnering both critical and financial success.

Miller’s newfound celebrity proved to be a stressful burden, and her fame grew incompatible with the quiet, simple existence she and her husband had cultivated. The strain spilled over into their marriage and in 1936 the Millers divorced, but Caroline was remarried the following year to Clyde Ray Jr., an antique dealer and florist. They moved to the town of Waynesville, North Carolina where Caroline worked in the family business while continuing to write short stories and articles for newspapers and magazines. They had a daughter and a son. After her second husband died, she moved to a remote mountain home in North Carolina. It was described as “so remote that visitors had to drive through a cow pasture taking care to close a maze of gates behind them” (Georgia Women Achievement, 2009 inductee). In the coming years Miller continued to write but she never published again after her sophomoric follow-up to Lamb In His Bosom entitled Lebanon (1944). For the most part, she lived a quiet, private life in rural western North Carolina.

On July 12, 1992, Caroline Miller died in Waynesville, North Carolina, at the age of 88. She was buried in Green Hill Cemetery.

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Film Adaptation:

• None.

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Literary Context in 1933-1934:

• Nobel Prize for Literature (1933): awarded to Russian writer Ivan Bunin (1870–1953) “for the strict artistry with which he has carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing.”
• Per Publishers Weekly, the #1 bestselling novel in 1933 was Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen. Other notable bestsellers included Ann Vickers by Sinclair Lewis and The Farm by Louis Bromfield.
• Nazi book burnings took place in Germany by the German Student Union. They principally burned works by Jewish intellectuals, leading to a German “Exilliteratur,” the name for works of German literature written during the German diaspora by refugee authors who fled from Nazi Germany
• W. H. Auden experienced his “Vision of Agape” this year.
• Boris Pasternak requested a private meeting with Stalin to discuss “life and death” which Stalin agreed to (but, despite his admiration for Pasternak, the meeting never actually took place).
• The name Inklings, previously used by a disbanded undergraduate group, was taken by an informal literary discussion group of University of Oxford academics, including C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.
• Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West was published.
• The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells was published.
• Sons by Pearl S. Buck was published.
• The Hound of Death and Lord Edgware Dies by Agatha Christie were published.
• The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett was published.
• Winner Take Nothing (short story collection) by Ernest Hemingway was published.
• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein was published.

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Did The Right Book Win?

While I am not a particularly strong admirer of Lamb In His Bosom, I am also not entirely sure which novel would have been a better selection for the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 instead. I suppose the Pulitzer could have considered Ernest Hemingway’s short story collection Winner Take Nothing though short story collections would not become winners of the Pulitzer Prize for years to come.

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Miller, Caroline. Lamb In His Bosom. New York, Harper and Brothers, 1933.