The Pope and Pulitzer are Both American
“Biggest News” in Books: I Was Right
The Conclave of Cardinals convened in Rome to pick the next Pope and the Pulitzer Prize Board convened in Columbia (University) to pick the next big book, and they both came up 100-percent, fried-apple-pie-on-a-stick American. The choice of Pope is not quite the purview of Dear Head of Mine, but longtime readers of the newsletter will already know who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (if they listened to me), as it was almost a year ago that I predicted James by Percival Everett would win the world’s biggest literary prize. You can read that prediction and my thoughts on the novel: here.
This was “Not Without Complications” as the New York Times headline read, however. The judges apparently were at risk of not choosing a winner at all, like they did (didn’t?) in 2012 (shame on them, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams or Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, great choices, come on). Eventually James did win, but the contentious nature of the vote led the chair of the jury, Merve Emre, to say rather caustically: “American publishing is not in a healthy state; the more directly its judgments are determined by the market and the mass media — the more sources of funding, like the NEA, disappear — the sicker it will become: homogenous, inert, inexpert, cheap.”
Emre’s criticism is not entirely unwarranted, but it comes at a strange time with Everett’s win. A writer who didn’t hit big commercial success until 24(!) novels into his career at age 68, an author known for his literary inventiveness and bravado. It is weird to have him in the same breath as the words “homogenous, inert, inexpert, cheap.” But the first half of Emre’s criticism certainly holds water, that literary prizes, including the Pulitzer, are more effected than ever by “the market” and “mass media.” As I wrote back in July of last year:
James will ultimately take the award home— not only has Everett built momentum around being one of American’s great literary treasures and hit the New York Times bestseller list, but he has written a book that screams American Historical Importance. Everett for the first time in his career…wrote something that is accessible and a down-the-line historical novel using one of the most significant American works of literature as its underpinning.
Before James won the Pulitzer it was already a #1 New York Times bestseller, on every “best of” list, won the National Book Award and other literary prizes, was reviewed everywhere it could be, and had already sold over 700,000 hardcover copies, making it the second highest selling new fiction book published in 2024. Emre’s diagnosis of the anatomy of James’ win was the right one, even if her conclusion about its commentary on the state of publishing was erroneous. What’s more is Everett’s path has become the new norm for the Pulitzer: crowning a prince at the end of the year rather than making a king. If you’ve been watching publishing for the past ten years, it was easy as apple pie to predict James as a winner.
The Rosetta Stone of Contemporary Publishing: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
No one single book describes this current era of publishing better than Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. The history of the “populist Pulitzer” starts just before Whitehead arrived, as I’ve written before:
The tipping point happened in 2014 or 2015. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, the 2014 winner, is an expansive, epic work of one life, no doubt a serious work by any measure, but given what came before and what came after you can see a decisive shift toward books that, while being perhaps no less pedigreed, are often less formally demanding or heavy in the traditional literary sense.
However, The Underground Railroad is the first of these blockbusters that is a certified genre novel to win the Pulitzer. Told as an alternate history of slavery, The Underground Railroad is a speculative novel, imagining that the underground railroad is an actual train, among other thought experiments that exist outside of the realism.
An incredibly perceptive author Lincoln Michel (who I edit and whose novel happened to publish yesterday; if you like “Brilliant”—Esquire, “Hilarious”—Elle, and “Just plain wonderful.” —Booklist novels than considering buying a copy,) wrote last week in his newsletter Counter Craft:
There have been many takes debating the most important literary trend of the century so far. The consensus seems to be that autofiction—highly autobiographical fiction represented by the likes of Karl Ove Knausgård, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, and (erroneously) Elena Ferrante—has been the most important development. I love each of those authors yet I’ve always thought the consensus was wrong. From my vantage, the most consequential aesthetic trend in literature over the last 25 years has been “genre-bending fiction.”
The Underground Railroad is further proof to Michel’s point, experimentation and genre blending has been a much bigger driver at the awards and for readers than autofiction or really anything else in the last decade (although you can spot a solid three Pulitzer nominees that fit the autofiction definition since The Underground Railroad was published). While The Goldfinch and All The Light We Cannot See were hugely popular novels that won the award, they were the type of grand, classic novels that more cleanly fit thematically with the history of the award. Concurrently The Underground Railroad also had something these popular novels didn’t which defines this current era, an explicit social core—American racism and its many faces. This would become the key second ingredient in this era of publishing for prestige, not just popularity but moral importance.
I’m forever indebted to The Underground Railroad as it was on Whitehead’s NPR interview with Terry Gross where they also discussed a Whitehead novel that sounded much more intriguing to me—The Intuitionist, a speculative noir novel about warring factions of elevator inspectors. I started reading Whitehead with The Intuitionist and went on to read a good three-fourths of his catalog. I consider him one of my favorite writers. But I would say that The Underground Railroad being crowned the seventh most important book of this century by The New York Times speaks to Emre’s criticism about sales dictating critical prestige. For my money The Underground Railroad isn’t even Whitehead’s best alternative history as literary allegory tackling racism (that would be the philosophical elevator novel). And it’s not his best novel by a long shot: that would be Nickel Boys, which would win the Pulitzer three years later (The Underground Railroad was going to be Colson’s The Revenant until he wrote a Godfather II and he couldn’t be denied consecutive awards, since he clearly wrote an even better novel). Both The Intuitionist and Nickel Boys are more challenging, less traditionally satisfying novels, exemplifying why Colson’s career was up and down commercially before The Underground Railroad.
The Underground Railroad is still Whitehead’s biggest book. An Oprah pick, and an everything else pick and prize winner, it set the template for the winner-take-all publishing of today. And it’s a remarkably consistent formula. Both James and Demon Copperhead, retellings of classics — a close cousin to alternative history — were by established literary authors late in their career, suffused with important social commentary, and already massive successes before they won the prize. The Underground Railroad had already sold 400,000 of the 500,000 hardcovers it would end up selling by the time it won the Pulitzer. Which does beg the question…
Is This Progress?
What gets trickier about using major prizes as a bellwether for progress or regression or “the state of American publishing” is that this commercial and critical blending has coincided with a two-decades long move away from a literary establishment that was primarily white and male. Working in book publishing through 2020, when a great reckoning around diversity happened, not just for books, but all of American society, has been illuminating.
One major observation is that establishments generally replace themselves with different establishments, not radical new systems. It’s important to remember that Whitehead won a MacArthur Genius Award and Everett, despite struggling for commercial success, had already been nominated for a Pulitzer before he won for James. Also, as one bookseller was quoted as saying of Everett’s win “[in a] world-shaking all-woman trio of finalists in a year when one novel by a male writer has taken up quite a lot of the available oxygen” (13 of 21 winners have been men in the last two decades). Toni Morrison, the last Black woman to win a Pulitzer in fiction way back in 1988, was an editor at Knopf and very much a part of the literary establishment herself. Gayl Jones has been the only other Black woman nominated since Morrison won (for Palmares). And guess what? Her first novel was edited by Toni Morrison (the first line of her Wikipedia bio, followed by “[her debut] was met with critical acclaim and praised by leading intellectuals including James Baldwin and John Updike.”).
The rarity of seeing women of color nominated or win the award demonstrates a lack of diversity writ large, but the nominations and wins if you scratch right below the surface show progress by inches not miles. This is not a commentary on Morrison’s or Whitehead’s or Everett’s work itself. But the tendency of publishing and other industries is to treat diversity like an on/off switch, and people like countable units. When really the question of progress or regression isn’t as simple as the bookseller above makes it out to be.
It's why Emre’s criticism is both wrongheaded and spot on. Where she is wrong is in implying that the state of American publishing and its literary award criteria is degrading, favoring some market and/or media establishment for the first time. The truth is that this has always been the case throughout history, and now this establishment simply looks a lot different. Is this progress? The reality and what hurts your brain sometimes is that Morrison’s, Whitehead’s, and Everett’s novels are actually important, deserving, and boundary pushing. But they are also authors that exist at the tippy-top on the margins and reflect the possibility of progress more than wholesale change. But a winner-takes-all market where the bestsellers, celebrity book club picks, and prize winners are all the same does not create an environment for diversity to flourish in a sustainable way up and down the publishing ladder, on the midlist. Top to bottom, the bestseller list for fiction is primarily white women, plus James and James Patterson. Nonfiction is still dominated by men. Next year, can we have a Pulitzer winner that pushes genre boundaries and tackles important issues, but isn’t over 50 and has a prize-winning, twenty-year track record already? Can we have a relatively unknown author? A younger author? A novel that tackles contemporary America rather than looks back to history or classics?
Everett and Whitehead deserve their flowers, but as writers whose work takes glee in skewering the bias and prejudice of people along the political spectrum, I suspect they would welcome a Pulitzer Prize winner that’s more transgressive and literarily challenging. Like, for instance, any of the novels they wrote before they actually won the prize for James and The Underground Railroad.
This was great, though I'd minorly quibble with your assertion about the Pulitzer Prizes and women of color. In the past few years alone we've seen the juries recognize Yiyun Li, Laila Lalami, Vauhini Vara, Jones. (Why these authors are consistently finalists rather than winners is certainly interesting to ponder, though.)
Very nice Sean. Bobby