“Sam Braden never talked about his father…” (opening line)
Martin Flavin’s third novel Journey In The Dark won both the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Harper Prize (a now-defunct $10,000 award that was distributed by the Harper Brothers publishing company from 1922-1965 before it was discontinued). For the 1944 Pulitzer Prize, Journey In The Dark somewhat amazingly managed to beat out Betty Smith’s classic coming of age novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Admittedly, when I first read Journey in the Dark years ago, I didn’t care for it. But after recently giving it a more in-depth re-read (since my chronological survey of the Pulitzers has changed considerably over time), I found Journey in the Dark to be a powerful, surprisingly moving portrait of a man and the age in which he lives. This bildungsroman tells the story of Sam Braden, an industrious young man, as he rises from poverty in a small Ohio river town to become a powerful business magnate in the city of Chicago. The Franklin Library edition of this book offers the following brief summary of the novel: Journey in the Dark is “a brilliant social history of a self-made millionaire who renounces his comfortable existence to work in a defense factory. It is also a skillful allegory of a nation coming of age during the war.” However, Journey in the Dark has faced its fair share of literary critics. W.J. Stuckey, for example in his book The Pulitzer Prize Novels: A Critical Backward Look, offers the following curt remarks: “In quality, Journey In The Dark ranks somewhere near the bottom of the Pulitzer roster… It has nothing to recommend it. It is a series of badly written, disconnected incidents which the author attempts to force into significance.”
Journey in the Dark is a sweeping epic that follows an everyman character, Sam Braden, as his life takes many twists and turns against the backdrop of immense changes taking place across the United States in the early 20th century. With loads of allusions to Charles Dickens and Mark Twain (two of Sam’s favorite authors in the novel), we are first introduced to Sam Braden as a young child. He is raised in a poor family that somewhat randomly decides to settle in the small town of Wyattville, Ohio –“a sleepy river town of about a thousand people, with a main street crawling up the bank above the levee, and a few brick store fronts on it with wooden canopies built out across the crazy wooden sidewalks, which were lined with hitching rails and were high above the unpaved, muddy street.” Sam is most proud of his mother, who comes from an upper-crust Episcopalian family by the name of Hathaway, they are “of old colonial stock,” while on the flipside, Sam remembers his father Jim as a “lazy, shiftless, discontented man” who eventually finds work as the marshal of Wyattville. Because the Braden family has no money, Sam’s assiduous mother is forced to work as a seamstress, spending long nights sewing dresses to make ends meet for the four children in the Braden house: Tom, Madge, Sam, and Nelly.
In the post-Civil War world of Wyattville, we quickly become aware of the racial and class dynamics at play –the “negroes” live down near Shanty Town while the more wealthy business owners, like the town’s namesake, the Wyatts, live in stately homes with iron fences enclosing them. Perhaps it goes without saying, the impoverished Bradens live “on the wrong side of the tracks” in a ramshackle home in Shanty Town. Each day, the “Mary Queen” riverboat arrives in Wyattville, and the few people who visit this little river town stay at the Wyatt Hotel. This is not exactly a destination for many people. All throughout his youth, Sam Braden has been enamored with the pretty young daughter of the Wyatt family: golden curly-haired Eileen Wyatt. To him, she is “like a goddess, untouchable, remote.” However, despite having an otherwise idyllic childhood, on his ninth Christmas, Sam is suddenly made aware of his family’s impoverishment, especially after he does not receive the sledding gift of his dreams. He vows then and there to one day become a millionaire. And, thanks to the occasionally sly, charming narrator in the novel, we learn that Sam eventually does become rich (earning as much as six million dollars).
One day, while handling a dress delivery on behalf of his mother, Sam pays a visit to the Wyatt house where he sees Eileen playing with her cousin Neill Wyatt. The moment spawns a lifetime of envy for Neill as “the object of his [Sam’s] wrath.” Sam despises being poor but he yearns to be what Neill represents to Eileen. Whereas Eileen serves as the embodiment of Sam’s desire for riches, Neill serves as a perpetual reminder of where Sam has come from. Nevertheless, Sam completes his task for his mother and along the way the kindly older businessman, Elliott Wyatt, slips a coin to Sam which he then uses to buy his mother a beautiful new thimble, an act which brings her to tears on Christmas. She later tragically dies when Sam is a mere fifteen years old. On her deathbed, Sam’s mother can barely speak but she asks Sam to remember to care for his sister Nelly. She gives Sam a prized gold locket, and after she dies, unsurprisingly Sam’s father turns to drinking.
The first few chapters in this novel each close with a fascinating little historical coda of the era: from the election of Grover Cleveland in 1892, to the silver crisis, to the panic of 1893; as well as the election of William McKinley, War with Spain, the Hearst papers with their big headlines and cartoons, and the advent of new technologies like electricity, the railroad, and even the automobile and the cinema. We are then carried onward through the 1910s after the country is led by Roosevelt and Taft (“the country had survived the hysteria of reform”) and the rise of World War I, influenza, and Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points.
As Sam grows up, Eileen is sent away to school. When she does return to Wyattville, he embarrasses himself a time or two in front of her, while she is flanked by a coy, giggling friend named Rebecca “Becky” (whose father Stanley Adams is a wealthy financier and banker in Chicago). Sam is also forced to quit high school and take a day job working in Clem Wyatt’s store in town. When he was younger he worked hours in the store in exchange for a brand new “Pope-Toledo” bicycle, but after bringing it home, his older brother Tom gets into a drunken dispute with their father and takes off with the bicycle, dashing Sam’s one youthful hope that year. Gradually, Sam’s older siblings (Tom and Madge) start to fade out of the picture as he grows closer with his sister Nelly, a girl who dreams of becoming an opera singer or perhaps an actress. He promises to help her achieve her dream. Realizing that working at Clem Wyatt’s store will not get Sam anywhere close to becoming a millionaire, he studies telegraphy and takes a job as a telegraph operator with the new Rock Island Railroad. From there, he is transferred from Wyattville to the larger city of Muscatine where we start to see a busier culture of industrialism taking root –the old ways of congenial friendliness quickly give way to utilitarian machinery and cold efficiency. Still, despite the newly emerging world Sam remains “diligent and punctual, polite and competent.” In Muscatine, Sam has a brief fling with a waitress named Jo and Nelly moves in with him only to then be taken advantage of by a penniless actor who is married with a child of his own (Nelly elopes with him but he quickly abandons her in New York, and it becomes a public scandal back in Wyattville as Nelly’s life gradually downhill).
Finally, Sam makes his way to the illustrious city of Chicago, the city of “I Will” where he works as a traveling salesman for Acme Paper, all the while living with a humble German immigrant family. Later, he partners with a proud Frenchman named Mr. Jules Tronchet (pronounced “Tron-Shay”) running a wallpaper company. This struck me as perhaps a bit of interesting autobiography inserted into the novel by Martin Flavin who also once worked at a prominent wallpaper company. At any rate, somewhat surprisingly Neill Wyatt and Becky Adams are married (following a dramatic scene of a car crash which leaves a scar on Becky’s face) but they are soon divorced. Likewise, Sam also manages to marry the girl of his childhood dreams, Eileen Wyatt. But the enigmatic, cold, dead-eyed Eileen clearly feels more obligated to marry Sam than anything else (for example, in response to Sam’s initial proposal, Eileen merely responds “You’ve always been so right-“). So, after a hectic and somewhat joyless wedding ceremony, Eileen says she wants privacy on their wedding night, and this loveless marriage seemingly goes unconsummated for days on end during their honeymoon, though there is an utterly engrossing passage in this section depicting Eileen’s family members aboard the Titanic as it sinks. Alas, with an insurmountable chasm seemingly set between Eileen and Sam, they also eventually decide to separate, much like Neill and Becky. And from there, Eileen goes straight into the arms of her one true love: Neill Wyatt.
“They didn’t quarrel. But the gap between them, which never had been closed, kept getting steadily wider, so gradually of course that you didn’t realize it except by looking back. In time he had to quit trying to do anything about it, saying to himself that it was the normal course of married life, but never quite believing it. There was nothing to complain of, to put your finger on; his home was nicely ordered; his wife was beautiful, educated, cultured, complaisant to his marital attentions, unresisting, unprotesting. There was nothing to find fault with except –he was alone, separated from her by that enigmatic thing which you couldn’t come to grips with, couldn’t touch. And the fault he didn’t find, and pretended wasn’t there, was growing all the time into a deeply rooted sense of injury and resentment, which must break out some day, as in the end it did” (243 on Sam and Eileen’s failed marriage).
With the outbreak of a labor strike at the “Tronshay” factory (coupled with the tragic death of an underage Polish boy who gets mangled in the machinery), Sam abruptly leaves and enlists in the army during World War I, but an armistice is signed before his unit ever sees any action. At the same time, his old nemesis Neill Wyatt is shot down and killed in France, leaving Eileen alone. It gives Sam a strange feeling. His boyhood nemesis has suddenly been killed. Sam later returns to Chicago and takes sole control of the Tronshay company, making it a successful national corporation where it draws the attention of the “wolves” on Wall Street, especially men like the elder investor Elliott Wyatt. Sam takes the company public but by 1933 it goes belly-up, only to be later reborn (luckily Sam sold all his stock at the company’s height, earning him about five million dollars). And after Sam finally has his own mahogany-filled office in the Loop downtown overlooking Lake Michigan (a dream he had long desired), he hires Emilie Kranz, the only daughter of the German immigrant family he first lived with in Chicago, only now she is a young woman, loyal and lovely, so he falls in love with her in a haphazard manner, professing his love one rainy evening by offering her a large sapphire ring. But unlike Eileen, Emilie quickly proves to be a loving and kind wife to Sam. She affectionately calls him “Unkam,” a play on her girlish nickname for him (“Uncle Sam”). They spend twenty happy years together and have one son Hathaway “Hath.” Fortunately, when the “golden bubble of the twenties burst” Sam is safe, while the elder Elliott Wyatt is ruined “like God fallen out of heaven.” Sam takes his family on a multi-year tour of Europe where his son Hath strangely befriends a young man who is also named Neill Wyatt (the namesake of Sam’s boyhood nemesis who has been killed). We learn that after leaving Sam, Eileen had a child with Neill, and their son was named in his honor (this is the boy Hath has now befriended).
Somehow, the name “Neill Wyatt” only continues to haunt Sam from the grave but there are other minor characters who make sudden appearances in the novel, as well, like Sam’s old friend Mike Hogan, and a young black girl named Acacia “Cassie” Cole (who seduced Sam back when they were teenagers, both of them losing their virginity to each other), and there is Sam’s sister Nelly who relocates to Hollywood only to become addicted to cocaine and needing to be permanently institutionalized. But the most important of these minor characters is likely Mitch Ballou, a quirky figure with a glass eye who serves as a foreign correspondent and becomes enamored with progressive politics, reporting on the Russian Revolution (though he later emphatically states he is not a communist). Both he and Sam eventually relocate back to Wyattville. Sam constructs his personal vast estate called Glencoe, and with Sam’s financial backing, Mitch runs a column in the local newspaper (the Gazette), only for it to cause quite a stir when Mitch unflinchingly reports on racism and the unfairness of the class system and so on. This leads to numerous quarrels between Mitch and Sam, with Sam being a staunch capitalist and Mitch being at least a sympathetic liberal. Mitch drunkenly yells at Sam one evening:
“‘You’ve done everything the copybooks advise, everything the kids are taught to think. You should be immortalized, for the story of your life is, in a way, the story of America, a statement of its values. And now, from where you’re sitting, what do you think about it? What do you really think about yourself?… I’ll tell you Sam, I’ll tell you how you look to me: the loneliest man I’ve ever known; and I’ve been lonely, too, but not like you… A lonely man, going nowhere, in the dark'” (398).
Sam grows especially irate when he discovers that his son Hath has fallen in love with Mitch’s daughter, Natasha “Nat” who is a ‘half-Russian Jewess.’ His contempt for Mitch manifests itself as antisemitism leading his son and Nat to angrily storm out of the house. Then in the cold of night, Sam’s wife Emilie goes wandering out into the woods to find them. Here, we learn that Emilie has actually developed a heart murmur which started after delivering Hath (hence why she and Sam decided not to have another child) and Sam finds Emilie shivering alone in the cold out in the woods. Following this incident, she catches pneumonia and dies several days later in 1941. In the years to come, Sam reconciles with Hath and Nat, explaining his whole story to them, particularly with respect to his childhood and Eileen Wyatt. Sam gives Nat the large sapphire ring that belonged to Emilie in life. However, the outbreak of World War II leads Hath to enlist in the Air Force just as he and Nat have a baby boy also named Sam. Sadly (and somewhat predictably) Hath is shot down while saving the lives of several men, including his friend Neill Wyatt. Sam, now an older man, tries to make himself useful to the war effort by learning to work with his hands –even crafting a pair of dice that he gave to Hath (who later died with them in his airplane). But the Department of War comes to buy Glencoe from Sam and they name the nearby field Wyatt Field (in honor of a late little known war hero named Neill Wyatt, as it is described to Sam). Even in old age, Sam cannot manage to escape the name “Neill Wyatt.” All the while, Sam starts renovating his old family home in Shanty Town (he dubs it a “monument”) and we are treated to bittersweet nostalgic passages of life before the wars in Wyattville. The novel ends as Neill Wyatt (the younger) pays a visit to Sam and explains the true heroism of his son’s actions before he died in battle. At the same time, the old iron fences of the Wyatt place are torn down (presumably they will be used to make bullets for the war), yet the stripping of this fence also serves as a symbol of hope for a new world to come wherein old fences are finally torn down.
In all, Journey in the Dark is a long beautiful saga about Sam Braden –it depicts his own unpredictable “journey in the dark” amidst a panoply of abrupt twists and turns (Flavin’s unique prose style gives readers a steady trickle of details in each chapter until all of a sudden he introduces an important detail to propel the novel forward). Journey in the Dark shows us all the tumult and struggle at the turn of the century as Sam perseveres through an extraordinary personal and historical epoch. Here, author Martin Flavin deftly manages to captivate readers with his gripping prose and surprisingly enticing characters, entrenching us in a vast, complex soap opera that spills out across an entire life as each new chapter shows us loved ones who die and friends who turn to enemies. Fair warning, this is assuredly an emotional, perhaps even tear-inducing novel.
However, despite Journey in the Dark being a unique stylistic achievement, I am a bit less clear on what exactly Flavin is trying to say in this novel. Is he trying to offer something unique about the American experience? Or by thoroughly showcasing Sam Braden’s Horatio Alger climb upward out of poverty, is he suggesting that the American Dream is ultimately a materialistic pursuit and nothing more? Or should we find something unique in Sam Braden’s character that is distinct from the others in the book? In other words, is Journey in the Dark a defense of the conventional notion of the American Dream or a critique of it? After all, Sam’s happiness does seem to be connected to his wealth, while other impoverished people in the novel only seem to remain perpetually unhappy (i.e. Jim Braden, Nelly, Mitch etc). Perhaps, unlike an earlier Pulitzer Prize-winner So Big by Edna Ferber, Journey in the Dark offers a familiar, even slightly more superficial, examination of the American Dream –a dream that can only be achieved with the right amount of money. Still, this is an incredibly vivid, richly-imagined, emotionally-gripping saga of one man and his age. Journey in the Dark comes recommended from me.
Notable Quotations:
“Sam Braden never talked about his father” (opening line).
“It was a friendly, helpful, democratic world along the Mississippi in the eighties. The frontier had moved on not very long ago, and the memory and habits of it had lingered. Folks were still accustomed to need a helping hand and to give one freely without question” (9).
“And suppose he should come face to face with Eileen Wyatt. She was in his class at school, and he was strangely fascinated by her, though he always pretended not to notice her. She had blonde curls and she was very pretty” (21).
“And in all that years that followed he would not forget this moment, nor would there be another in his life which would quite equal this” (37 –upon Sam Braden gifting his mother a shiny thimble for Christmas as she weeps with joy).
“‘Pa hasn’t any money. We’re poor, I tell you, poorer than the Hogans or the Coles, than most anybody in town. And if Mom didn’t sit up nights dressmaking, we’d maybe starve to death'” (43).
“‘When I grow up I won’t be poor'” (44).
“Still, it should not be inferred that Sam’s boyhood was a melancholy sequence of frustrations and defeats. On the whole he led a healthy, carefree life whose underprivileged aspects which, in some degree he shared with numerous other boys of his acquaintance, were seldom in his thought unless events demanded their consideration” (49).
“It took Sam nearly thirty years to acquire his first million. There was nothing spectacular about it: hard work, eternal vigilance, and a kind of native shrewdness – these plus Lady Luck, who smiled at him at last, ultimately turned the trick. And the million, once acquired, quickly multiplied itself, for wealth breeds wealth, and even stupid people with a nest egg of this sort are as likely as not to go on getting richer” (107).
“To appreciate money you must have been without it, must have felt the teeth of poverty” (112).
“…rich men didn’t want ambitious men around them, as witness in himself his choice of Mike; that the making of money was a solitary business whose secrets, if they must be shared at all, had best be shared with unambitious men, loyal, mediocre men, content with crumbs” (117).
“Life proceeds at an uneven pace, in jerks and spurts, like growing plants and children. It rushes headlong for a whole and then it seems to stop. It is not unlike a river, tearing through a narrow channel over shoals and treacherous rocks, and then abruptly spreading out into a placid stream, ripples slowly on its way -or, trapped in an eddy near the shore, may actually flow backwards for a time” (134).
“Chicago, proud city whose motto is ‘I Will.’ …Sam loved it from the start, in common with countless other boys who came flocking from the farms and country towns throughout the Middle West. And it opened wide its arms and took them in. It was made for them and they for it – like Mecca for the Moslems, a holy city and their own, the heart of their America, the fulfillment of a promise” (171).
“It was funny – those people that you’d think would be so soft – you could wham them around but you couldn’t them yell or get them down.There was something that they had kept them on their feet” (188).
“Sam married Eileen Wyatt, but not hurriedly or rashly. They were married in Chicago in the spring of 1912. Quite likely Fate had tired, and Eileen too, perhaps, of trying to avert it” (205).
“Shadows on the sun, but they were little ones, not lingering very long, only long enough to act as a reminder, to keep you from forgetting the measure of your blessings” (314, Sam reflecting after seeing his brother Tom in a drunken gambling fight in a saloon in Tia Juana while on the honeymoon with Emilie).
“Well, death is like that, coming where and when you least expect it. A lot of people die, are dying all the time, though you rarely think about it” (328, Sam ruminating on the death of Mama Kranz).
“I saw a thing in Russia that I’ve seen nowhere else. I saw a lot of people working for an idea. Not every stupid pirate working for himself, not repeating like a litany, ‘What do I get out of it?’ but a lot of people working for an idea, understand? Maybe a good idea, or maybe bad, I’m not sure about that” (333, Sam’s friend Mitch talking about his experience reporting on the Russian Revolution).
“And so he was content to tell them what had happened, hoping they would see how one step led to another and could hardly be averted, the steps of that ladder which he had so painfully climbed, and which now it seemed had no more rungs, leaving him suspended helpless in the air no closer to the stars than he had been at the start” (414, Sam explaining his life story to Hath and Nat).
On the 1944 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1944 Pulitzer Prize Jury was composed of the same three members as in the prior year: John R. Chamberlain (Chair), Lewis S. Gannett, and Maxwell S. Geismar. They apparently discussed a variety of works for the prize, including John P. Marquand’s So Little Time, Martin Flavin’s Journey in the Dark, Christine Weston’s Indigo, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, John Dos Passos’s Number One, and Ira Wolfert’s Tucker’s People.
- John R. Chamberlain (1904-1991) was a former anti-war advocate who wrote for a variety of publications like The New York Times, Time, Life, Fortune, Scribner’s and Harper’s. By the early 1940s he had shifted into a more libertarian/right-leaning political conviction. He began writing for The Wall Street Journal, taught journalism at Columbia University, and then became a celebrated book reviewer for a libertarian publication entitled The Freeman.
- 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.
- 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).
In the Jury Report sent to Frank Fackenthal in 1944 by John Chamberlain, he detailed the extent to which the jury was divided in its opinions by listing out each juror’s ranked preferences:
John Chamberlain ranked his preferences as follows:
- Martin Flavin’s Journey in the Dark
- J.P. Marquand’s So Little Time
- Christine Weston’s Indigo
- Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Lewis Gannett ranked his preferences as follows:
- Christine Weston’s Indigo
- Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
- Martin Flavin’s Journey in the Dark
- J.P. Marqand’s So Little Time
Maxwell Geismar ranked his preferences as follows:
- John Dos Passos’s Number One
- Ira Wolfert’s Tucker’s People
- J.P. Marquand’s So Little Time
- Martin Flavin’s Journey in the Dark
Per the Jury Report, John Chamberlain sought to dismiss a few of the nominees right off the bat and thereby hopefully clarify things for the Board. Since J.P. Marquand had already won a Pulitzer (see my review of The Late George Apley here), Chamberlain suggested the Board overlook his nomination for 1944. Similarly, for Christine Weston, Chamberlain said “it remains a question whether her work is properly to be considered a part of American literature” since Indigo was set in India. The prize then pointed starkly in favor of Martin Flavin’s Journey in the Dark. However, Maxwell Geismar voiced a strong minority plea in favor of Ira Wolfert’s Tucker’s People, and both Lewis Gannett and John Chamberlain both praised Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn because it “has a glow and charm about it that mark it out as a book worth considering, although it is probable [sic?] less sheerly creative than So Little Time, Indigo, and Journey in the Dark.” It seems the Board ultimately selected Journey in the Dark and left it at that.
Who Is Martin Flavin?
Martin Archer Flavin (1883-1967) was born in San Francisco. He grew up in Chicago and attended the University of Chicago from 1903-1905. He began writing at the age of twenty-two but quit in order to work as an office boy at a wallpaper company, eventually working his way up to the role of vice president (which was when he started writing plays in 1918). By 1929, he had become a successful playwright, at one point having three simultaneous plays on Broadway at once, including a drama called The Criminal Code which won the New York Theatre Club medal for best play of the year, and Broken Dishes, in which Bette Davis made her stage debut.
Throughout his life, he married three times (he had three children from his first two marriages). For a short time he served in the United States Army (not unlike Sam Braden in Journey In The Dark), but Flavin left his role at the wallpaper company in 1929 to devote his time fully to writing. Across his career, he wrote a total of five novels, two works of nonfiction, twelve plays, and he co-wrote several Hollywood screenplays, including portions of the first big prison film The Big House (1930).
Martin Flavin died at the age of 84 in Carmel, California on December 28, 1967 after succumbing to injuries from a bad fall. His papers were later donated to his alma mater the University of Chicago.
Film Adaptation:
- None.
Literary Context in 1943-1944:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1943): not awarded during World War II.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the #1 bestseller in 1943 was The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas. Another notable bestseller that year included A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.
- Thomas Mann completed Joseph der Ernährer (Joseph the Provider) in California, the last of his Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy which he began in December 1926.
- The self-illustrated children’s novella The Little Prince written by exiled French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (the all-time best-selling book in France) was published in New York.
- A strongly antisemitic production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is staged at the Burgtheater in Vienna.
- Having transferred from the Merchant Marine to the United States Navy and served eight days of active duty, Jack Kerouac was honorably discharged on psychiatric grounds. In New York City, Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg all became friends.
- George Orwell resigned from the BBC to become literary editor of the left-wing London paper Tribune.
- The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler was published.
- Perelandra by C. S. Lewis was published.
- The publication of The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (d. 1942) concluded.
- At Heaven’s Gate by Robert Penn Warren was published.
- The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner was published.
- Double Indemnity by James M. Cain was published.
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand was published.
- Gideon Planish by Sinclair Lewis was published.
- Wide is the Gate by Upton Sinclair was published, the fourth book in the Lanny Budd series.
- The Looking-Glass by William March was published.
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith was published.
- A Haunted House and Other Short Stories by Virginia Woolf is posthumously published (after she committed suicide in 1941).
Did The Right Book Win?
I likely would have selected Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 instead of Martin Flavin’s Journey in the Dark, but I am still glad for the opportunity have read this sprawling, engrossing epic. Journey in the Dark is not a particularly experimental novel –though the amusing interjections of the narrator are just ever so slightly reminiscent of Swift or Sterne– but it does naturally engender a great deal of empathy for the hardy people who lived through the chaotic events of the early twentieth century. It remains an under-appreciated novel in our day and age, even if it is not among the greatest of Pulitzer Prize-winners.
Flavin, Martin. Journey In The Dark. Avon Books (Hearst Corporation, published by arrangement with Harper and Row), third Avon Printing edition, New York, New York, 1965. After re-reading the book in 2025, I used the wonderful Franklin Library edition. I have tried to correct quotes and page numbers where applicable above. Martin Flavin dedicated the book to “Flavia, Martin, and Sean” (his three children).