Genius Grants Don't Pay off in Literature

[monroe at mpm.edu]

Genius grants don't pay off in literature
MacArthur finds authors late - and defies a push in philanthropy to evaluate
the impact of giving

By Mark Scheffler
 
	
As part of a program widely known as genius grants, the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation most years gives one or more authors
$500,000, hoping financial freedom will help the writers produce their best
work.

An examination of the program, however, reveals that most of the 31 writers
chosen since 1981 as MacArthur Fellows had already hit their artistic peak.
That conclusion is supported by the 14 major awards - either a Pulitzer
Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award or
PEN/Faulkner prize - and 37 minor awards the authors received before getting
their MacArthur money.

Surveying book reviews, author profiles and the opinions of literary
scholars, Crain's determined that 88% of the MacArthur recipients wrote
their greatest works before being recognized by the Chicago-based
foundation. The sheer number of books produced by the writers declined, too,
after their MacArthur awards.

It would reinforce romantic notions that great art requires personal
sacrifice to suggest that, half-a-million dollars in hand, writers get lazy.
But something else appears to account for the failure of the MacArthur
program to fulfill its promise: Writers are mostly chosen too late in their
careers, average age 48, and well after the literary establishment has
recognized them for excellence.

That's not how the program was supposed to work...

[...]

And yet, MacArthur in 1988 chose Thomas Pynchon, some 25 years into his
career and fully 15 years after his greatest achievement, "Gravity's
Rainbow," a convoluted story of paranoia and missile technology in the
period after World War II....

To be sure, the foundation has in a small handful of cases recognized
writers who then went on to do their greatest works. Cormac McCarthy's 1981
MacArthur prize came 11 years before "All the Pretty Horses," the first
installment of his acclaimed Border Trilogy and a winner of the National
Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award....

http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=15254
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20050124/4a3e6bd8/attachment.html>