A critique of the novels that won the Pulitzer Prize between 1918 and 1962. It was interesting to see some of the background history of the prize, but I felt the author was just trying to tell everyone how bad they all were. I disagreed on a lot of them. I didn't feel he was very even-handed. ( )

938 The Pulitzer Prize Novels: A Critical Backward Look, by W. J. Stuckey (read 27 Dec 1967) I have read all the Pulitzer prize-winning fiction, so it was with no little interest that I read this volume, which discusses critically all the fiction winners up to the time it was written. The author found nearly all of the novels bad. I did not find them all good, but some of them which the author pans unmercifully I found positively exhilarating and unlaydownable. This is somewhat mortifying to me, but then I am not a trained nor an educated critic, so I guess this isn't too bad. For instance, he has nothing good to say for The Caine Mutiny nor for Advise and Consent, both of which I gobbled up. The things I enjoyed about those books, however, had nothing to do with technical novelistic ability, but derived from that therein which appealed to me: the Navy and politics. In fact, Stuckey bemoans Hemingway and Faulkner not getting a prize for earlier works, then says--when they got one--that the works given a prize were inferior! He says All the King's Men was the best novel given a prize--and I did enjoy that greatly. Well, this critical study was fascinating to me, because, for once, I had read every one of the books discussed. ( )