The Pulitzer Prizes Are An Embarrassment

There’s a way that you’re kind of, sort of, supposed to complain about prizes — that they’re a bit silly of course, but they don’t really do any harm, that they have roughly the same relationship to art that a dress-up party might have to a regular night out, and then if you talk to someone vaguely connected with the industry, they’ll give you a serious, abstract look and say that the prizes really drive sales and who knows, actually, what would happen to the arts industry if the prizes disappeared. And then you say something about all the great books that the prize committees have overlooked (The Great Gatsby, which lost out to that classic, So Big, by Edna Ferber; The Catcher in the Rye, which was preempted by Conrad Richter’s The Town) but the consensus is that the prize committees are trying and the law of probability is that they’ll miss out some of the time, that it’s sort of like that famous meme where a dart-throwing monkey can predict the stock market as well as any analyst, but at the end of the day you don’t hire the monkey as your broker.