What to Read When Stuck in Traffic

The Washington, DC area is notorious for its traffic. According to The Christian Science Monitor, we have the second-worst commute times in the nation, right after New York. I was born in DC and grew up in its suburbs, so I know that firsthand from years of my own commutes while working in the city and putting myself through college.

So what do Booklab authors who live outside the city do? Many listen to audiobooks -- that's not new in and of itself. But one of them discovered something that got me thinking excitedly about its implications for scholarly publishing. He listened to David Hackett Fischer's well-reviewed Washington's Crossing, and found himself making surprise connections between themes in that book and his own work writing about more recent societal issues. He developed a whole argument that grew out of something he heard in Fischer, and it now appears in his manuscript with credit to Fisher's book.

A long discussion ensued about reading more generally in the history of a nation or region one writes about. We are rarely as broadly educated as we should be, especially people with doctorates whose reading tends to the narrow and targeted. This author's experience inspired me to think about a better grounding in the history of any culture, even while writing about aspects of it that may be many generations later, and about the value of audiobooks in the drive-time commute to get there.

Sometimes even Pulitzer winners are forgotten

Abe Books has an engaging feature today on its top-10 forgotten Pulitzer Prize-winning books. All of them were new to me save one -- I had definitely heard of Advise and Consent, and it was a surprise to find it out-of-print. None of the authors was familiar to me.

Can you write a book with the goal of winning a prize?

Journalism's critics have a name for those long, usually politically correct features or series that newspapers tend run from time to time. You know the ones I mean: "Enrique's Journey," the story of a Honduran boy's search for his mother (Los Angeles Times); "Boss Hog," about hog farm pollution in North Carolina (the News and Observer); or "A Nation Challenged" about the aftermath of 9/11 (New York Times). Periodically papers take these on, with varying success , often crossing the line from hard news to a kind of literary nonfiction. Critics call them "Pulitzer Bait," since only pieces that broad, ambitious and (in their way) artistic have solid chances of becoming finalists for the prize.

Yet recently when I suggested to an author who had won the Pulitzer for one book and been nominated for another that there had been any strategy in her accomplishments, she balked. "Absolutely not!" she said. "You can't write a book to win a prize!"

Why on earth not? Journalists don't mind admitting that they sometimes write to win. Many are comfortable discussing the professional benefits of a Pulitzer, and the rewards both individually and for the host newspaper. Yet I have encountered resistance among otherwise ambitious academic authors to the idea that they would ever write with public rewards in mind.

In this office we do think about Pulitzers, National Book Awards, even Nobels. Part of my mission is an effort to quantify what has made books successful in the past, and what might signal great success in the future. Upcoming blog entries will analyze all sorts of winners, and will also examine academic bestsellers and how they got there. Why? Because I believe that just like the olympics, authors CAN run for prizes, not as a crass or compromising ends in themselves, but as the logical outcome of meaningful and ambitious careers.

What kind of academic books win the Pulitzer Prize?

The results of the meeting sponsored by the Government Department are well worth considering here. We looked at the past decade and a half of Pulitzer results for nonfiction, and found some interesting consistencies. When focusing exclusively on university presses, the prize distribution followed a pattern. In future blog posts I'll attempt to analyze this by contacting the authors and getting their thoughts on what goes into the creation of a such a book. I'll also consider the words of Martin J. Sherwin of Tufts, whose book American Prometheus about Oppenheimer won the 2006 prize with Knopf as publisher. Sherwin does not believe that one can or should write to win a prize, but he also has useful thoughts about why a given book might succeed. Since 1986, 16 books from university presses have won Pulitzers (this list does not include books from elite trade presses). The breakdown is as follows (alphabetical order):

Carnegie-Mellon University Press: 1
Harvard University Press: 2
Louisiana State University Press: 2
Oxford University Press: 7
Princeton University Press: 1
Wesleyan University Press: 2 (1 with University Press of New England)

And here are the titles, grouped by year:

1986, Poetry, The Flying Change by Henry Taylor (Louisiana State University Press)

1987, Poetry, Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove (Carnegie-Mellon University Press)

1989, History, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson (Oxford University Press)

1990, Biography or autobiography, Machiavelli in Hell by Sebastian de Grazia (Princeton University Press)

1991, General Nonfiction, The Ants by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson (Belknap/Harvard University Press)

1992, History, The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties by Mark E. Neely, Jr. (Oxford University Press) ; Poetry, Selected Poems by James Tate (Wesleyan University Press)

1994, Poetry, Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa (Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England)

1995, Biography or autobiography, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life by Joan D. Hedrick (Oxford University Press)

1997, Poetry, Alive Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller (Louisiana State University Press)

1999, History, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (Oxford University Press)

2000, History, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 by David M. Kennedy (Oxford University Press)

2004, History, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration by Steven Hahn (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)

2005, History, Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford University Press)

2006, History, Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky (Oxford University Press); Poetry, Late Wife by Claudia Emerson (Louisiana State University Press)