Today, the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction will be chosen. Much hype surrounds the prize due to the lack of a chosen winner last year. This stalemate was the first in 35 years and is counted among only a few other cases since the prize’s inception in 1948. The failure for any of last year’s three finalists, which included Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia” (a personal favorite!), “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson, and “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace, who passed away in 2008, was a blow to the publishing world, preventing the increase in sales that is often sparked by the win. It also calls into question the quality of literary fiction in today’s literature market; however, last year was widely viewed as a great year for both literary output and quality writing. Perhaps this range of literature has been somewhat overlooked. If we look back, writers used to be the voices of the people, a source of learning and the opportunity for self reflection needed by the public. Now, it often feels that popular literature is not the mind-expanding work of a great author, but rather the grammatically awkward tales of vampire love or middle-aged sexual fantasies.
Perhaps among the many wonderful reasons there are for looking back at “the classics” there is also a reverence within the literary scholars’ world for a time when writing was a major way of connecting and understanding everything around us. Even as a student of literature, I feel that contemporary works are not often studied and the names of many popular authors are a mystery to me. Without widespread popularity, it feels difficult to keep up with this separate world and connect with the burgeoning community of young, hard working authors. Perhaps, too, contemporary literature is handicapped by readers’ lack of knowledge of an author. Often, we choose books based on known admiration of an author, but without widespread adoration of many writers, we are left with no knowledge of our options. Hopefully this year will yield another winner of this prestigious prize and spark public interest in the literary community and help writers regain their power as cultural leaders in spreading knowledge of the self and providing the public an opportunity for introspection.
Sources:
http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/…
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04…