Pulitzer Prize raising its standards?

[Ya Sam]

http://www.waltontribune.com/story.lasso?ewcd=8b600421b26860c0


'You see, I was all ready to write a nice, long diatribe about the Pulitzer 
and their illegitimacy as a standard of quality. Almost every year, after 
all, the Pulitzer for fiction – the category that takes up my attention as 
an obsessive reader – is given to an undeserving book that is long, 
pretentious and boring, ignoring better books that don’t quite fit the 
Pulitzer committee’s idea of how “literature” should read.

This is how John Updike, an author who has won the Pulitzer twice for 
writing banal books about a spoiled, brainless American twit, has come to be 
acclaimed by many as capturing the essence of the American Dream gone wrong, 
when the only thing wrong is that Updike is read at all.

Yet at the same time, great modern writers like Thomas Pynchon don’t have 
one (to be fair, the selection jury tried to give it to him for “Gravity’s 
Rainbow,” but the committee was so horrified by the book they decided not to 
award a prize for fiction that year).

So here I am, all ready to lambast the Pulitzer for awarding yet another bit 
of nonsense a prize, and then they pull the rug out from under me and leave 
me with nothing to write in my column. This year’s Pulitzer for fiction, 
instead of going to Updike’s latest crime against literature or a similar 
piece of horror, finally went to the greatest living American author.' ...

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