PULITZER PRIZES of the 1960s

1960 Winner

The Reivers
William Faulkner 

1963 Winner

The Reivers' comedic and lighthearted and at the same time it tackles and touches on many of the dark and not so comedic sectors of human nature. The novel is viewed through the lens of a young man named Lucius priest. Lucius accompanies his on an unsanctioned trip to Memphis with two of his fathers employees Boon Hoggenbeck and Ned McCaslin. Putting it lightly Lucius' traveling companions are, "men of the world" that is they protray a great deal of flaws and weaknesses that permiate humanity. They drink, smoke, gamble, steal, and womanize..... As Faulkner puts it they are, "practitioners of non-virtue". As the trip progresses Lucius soon realizes that he too has began down the path of non-virtue as it is not the destination that is important but how they get there. Every leg of the journey find the characters with a new problem to tackle and a new display of what non-virtue is. As with many of his novels Faulkner takes the base human instincts good and bad and portrays them in a believable and poignant manner.

1964 Winner 

1967 Winner 

The story of a Jewish handyman unjustly imprisoned for the murder of a Christian boy.   Mendel Bellis is Yako Bok, a nonreligious Jewish handyman "who liked things in place and functioning." Yakov goes to Kiev, by chance saves the life of a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds, who, not knowing Yakov is a Jew, gives him a job in his brick factory. When the blood-drained corpse of the Christian boy is found, Yakov is arrested by the secret police in the name of Nicholas II; and so enters his terrible ordeal. The world is petty, cruel and corrupt, but also creakingly inefficient. The inefficiency of the Czar’s oppressive and reactionary regime is manifested in Bibikov, the Investigating Magistrate for Cases of Extraordinary Importance. Bibikov has a conscience; he cannot totally turn his back on truth. It is his misfortune to become convinced of Yakov’s innocence.  This belief drives Bibikov to an early death. He is Yakov’s symbolic double, in a way his foil, and when he goes much of the novel’s inner tension goes with him. Yakov endures. He endures solitary confinement, chains, daily physical searchings and beatings. He refuses to "confess," and in his cell he comes to an understanding of that refusal. His victory is that a trial will take place; whatever the verdict, the evidence of his innocence will be made public. Thus Yakov, a most unpolitical man, fulfills his political and moral function. He comes indeed to know his choices, to make a choice and come to terms with it. Yakov will doubtless be convicted, but in his drams the Czar confesses helplessnes and in the streets through which the prison threads its way, bloody revolution spurts to its final warnings.

1968 Winner

Turner's Rebellion took place in the long hot summer of 1831, in the state of Virginia. When it was over, 59 white people were dead; the insurgents were rounded up and either hanged or worse; and Nat Turner, a preacher, confessed to his part in the only effective revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery.  In his introduction of this Pulitzer Prize winner, Styron says "it has been my own intention to try to re-create a man and his era, and to produce a work that is less an historical novel in conventional terms than a meditation on history."

1969 Winner 

In June 1945, a young Tano Indian named Abel returns from World War II army service to his home village, Walatowa, in New Mexico's Canon de San Diego, only to discover that he has entered a hell between two cultures. The world of his grandfather, Francisco--and of Francisco's fathers before him--is a world of seasonal rhythms, a harsh and beautiful place defined by unremitting poverty; a land with creatures, traditions and ceremonies reaching back thousands of years. It is the urban world of post-war white America, with its material abundance and promises of plenty that draws Abel away from his people. It is a choice fraught with pain, however, for Abel winds up in prison, then drifts to Los Angeles and a life of dissipation, disgust, and despair. Torn between pueblo and city, between ancient ritual and modern materialism, between starlight and streetlight, Abel descends further and further into his own private hell; a fate not unknown to thousands of Native Americans.