TWT #127 –

On May 6th, 1926, Sinclair Lewis rejected the Best Novel Pulitzer Prize for his book Arrowsmith because he believed that prizes made people change the topics or tones of their books to “tickle the prejudices of a haphazard committee.”

It’s still a debated whether Sinclair actually rejected the prize because his previous book, Main Street, didn’t win the Pulitzer back in 1921. The best argument for this debate is that Sinclair did accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930.

Lewis himself.

Regardless, the letter he wrote to the Pulitzer committee definitely rustled some jimmies. No one likes being rejected, and Sinclair basically said their prize was a worthless sham.

As Sinclair happens to be a ~sightly~ better writer than I, I’ll let him take it from here:

All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous. The seekers for prizes tend to labor not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards: they tend to write this, or timorously to avoid writing that, in order to tickle the prejudices of a haphazard committee. And the Pulitzer Prize for novels is peculiarly objectionable because the terms of it have been constantly and grievously misrepresented.

Those terms are that the prize shall be given “for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” This phrase, if it means anything whatever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment. Sinclair Lewis’ rejection letter to the Pulitzer committee



Ouch dude. Brutal.

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