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This is the On the Media Midweek Podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This holiday season, bookstore window displays and Christmas stockings will be filled with novels minted with gold and silver medals. Those gilded stamps denote recognition by literary prizes like the National Book Award, which was just announced last month.
Alexander Menchel is the author of Writing Backwards, Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon. With Melanie Walsh, he recently wrote a piece for the online magazine Public Books titled What 35 Years of Data Can Tell Us About Who Will Win the National Book Award.
But before we get to the changes in how literary prizes have been awarded over the past few decades, I asked Manchel whether these prizes actually matter. And he told me that whether we like it or not, their influence is undeniable. Even just finalists for these prizes are more likely to be read, taught, and studied. And the ones that win get an even bigger boost.
Here, Manchel cites a study he co-wrote with Laura B. McGrath and J.D. Porter called Who Cares About Literary Prizes?
We looked at hundreds of high-profile 21st century novels, and we found that the number of Goodreads ratings, which is a kind of proxy for readership, jumps from 48,000 for a book that is not even shortlisted to 98,000 for a book that wins. Wow. And the same is true on university syllabi. The average book, even a high-profile book, is taught a grand total of zero times in a university classroom, but it ends up on a
as many as 15 syllabi on average when it wins. And what about sales? You know, sales is the great mystery and the brass ring for scholars like me. We don't have good publicly available data on sales. So we have to use these other proxies for readership to figure that out.
And of course, sales don't always tell us about what people are actually reading. If you take the time to leave a Goodreads rating or review or to study it over a week in a course, that's far more engagement than as we can all relate to buying a book and never actually cracking the spine.
I'm reminded of a hilarious exercise that the great editor and writer Michael Kinsley did where he decided to go into one of the big Washington bookstores and put a slip in all these big Washington doorstops on page 200 that said, if you get this far, call this number and you'll get 10 bucks and didn't get a single taker.
I love this. I mean, Brooke, I have a bunch of friends who live in New York City. And if I had a dime for every one of them that has a copy of Robert Caro's The Power Broker somewhere in their apartment, I'd be a wealthy man.
We have seen just, I mean, anecdotally, but constantly, the appearance of books that have been made into movies on the bestseller list years after they were first published. So talk about the impact of screen adaptations.
In the last few years alone, we've seen a number of prize-winning novels or even novels that have just been shortlisted for a major literary award being adapted to prestige TV and to film. I'm thinking here of books like The Underground Railroad, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer by Colson Whitehead.
Minjin Lee's Pachinko, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. And more recently, Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer. I know that broadcasting could get me executed, but I will not be silenced. I hope you will tune in again tomorrow.
Well, in that case, it was such a big seller, it hardly needed a movie adaptation. But this is one of those things where the production companies and the streamers themselves look not only at the sales that have already occurred, but at things like prestige, as denoted by literary awards, to signal not only what people are interested in, but what is taken to be literary.
Part of the way that prestige TV gets its prestige is by borrowing the literary prestige from novels like these. And people love to talk about prizes, but especially when there's an upset.
Tell me about the most objected-to award decision of the past half century. And you know where I'm going with that, the National Book Award of 1987. I do. So as I argue in my book, Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved is the single most celebrated contemporary American novel. I mean, it's among the most widely read, written about, and admired works of the last half century.
And in 1987, Beloved was nominated for the National Book Award. But it was ultimately passed over in favor of Larry Heinemann's Vietnam War novel, Paco's Story. And this truly was a great upset.
Jonathan Yardley wrote in the Washington Post, quote, you couldn't have cut the collective astonishment with a machete. That's how startled were the assembled Illuminati. Truman over Dewey was nothing as to Heinemann over Morrison. And then over at the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani opened her review with just two words. What happened? What happened?
Let's talk about that, because the rumor was that the sole black judge on the judging panel was a vote against Beloved, right? Yeah.
This was the rumor at the time that it was a split decision, the result of a two to one vote. Now, there were three at that time judges on the National Book Award jury, the critic Richard Eder and the novelists Hilma Wulitzer and Gloria Naylor, who is the judge you're referring to.
Wollitzer was later quoted as saying it was an agonizing decision. Eder had, on the one hand, given Paco's story a positive review in the LA Times where he worked, and he had only written a short piece on Beloved as part of a larger article. But Naylor, the only Black judge on the jury, was rumored to have voted against Beloved. After Beloved was passed over for the National Book Award, a group of 50 Black writers, critics, and scholars took out an open
open letter in the New York Times to praise the novel and to protest the decision by the prize. One of the signatories of that letter, June Jordan, ultimately withdrew a creative writing fellowship for Gloria Naylor. And she said that it would be, quote, embarrassing and morally elliptical for Naylor to take up that position.
But still, we have to say, no one knows for sure who voted how. You know, in the room where literary history is being made, very little is known. So what did you learn in your research about the juries that decide which books will win the big prizes?
Because we can never know for sure exactly what happens in the room, we wanted to figure out at least who was there. And we drew on 35 years of data. And one of the first things we found is just how much influence over literary prestige is held by a very small number of people. How small?
Well, over the last 35 years, for example, when it comes to the Pulitzer Prize, just five people have made up more than 20% of all the jurors. And if you add another five names to that list, it's more than a third of all jurors. And these people are mostly professional reviewers. Gail Caldwell at the Boston Globe, Richard Eder at the LA Times, Maria Rana at the Washington Post. I mean, these people have judged the Pulitzer Prize.
four, six, even seven times over the past 35 years. I mean, Eder is a particularly interesting example because he was on the National Book Award jury that ultimately passed over Toni Morrison for the 1987 award. But less than a year later, he was on the Pulitzer jury that ultimately resulted in Morrison getting the award for the same book.
So let's move on to how the prizes have changed over the years and why. In 2023, the jury for the National Book Award was the most diverse ever, and its short list has been among the most diverse too. Absolutely. To put this in perspective, in the few years after Morrison's Beloved was published, you know, the late 1980s, only around 15% of judges for these prizes were people of color.
And in 16 of the last 35 years, the nominating jury for the Pulitzer did not include a single person of color. But, you know, if we skip ahead to the last few years, people of color have made up more than half of the juries for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. So should we assume that the more judges of color are appointed, the more they'll be authors of color winning prizes? The
The broad trend is that both of those things have occurred over the past several decades, except here's where things get wonky. Here's where things get interesting. On the scale of the individual year, one doesn't necessarily lead to the other. A more diverse jury doesn't necessarily yield a more diverse group of finalists.
You have said that the rumors about Gloria Naylor's vote, if that's true, for the 1987 National Book Award made it clear that the judges' identity will never wholly dictate which books or book they prefer. But never say never. It sounds like when it comes to all white judges, it actually may. We found two different things. One is that they're
is not as close a correlation between the jury's demographics and the shortlist demographics. But there is a tighter correlation between the diversity of the jury and who ultimately wins. Okay. I mean, it's true. We found that when the jury was composed only of white judges, they selected a white winner every single time.
And we also found that there was a correlation between more and more judges of color and the likelihood that that jury would select a novelist or a writer of color as their winner. But as the Naylor example makes clear...
We found that if there is a Black or Asian American writer who's named a finalist for these awards, there is about half the time not a Black or Asian American judge on the committee. It's not a simple exercise in identification that if you are of a certain identity, you automatically vote for the book that is by a writer who shares that. And I think part of what we're seeing in this data is when you're sitting in a room
that reminds you consistently that your perspective is just one of many perspectives that leads to a wider variety of writers being celebrated by the prizes. And I think that's likely the reason why more diverse juries end up picking more diverse writers for their winners.
It's important to have a diverse group of jurors, not just because they are somehow automatically going to select a diverse group of winners, but because there is a wide variety of literary taste in this country and there is a great diversity of readers.
So you have the dynamics in the jury room that you say is very important. People looking around and realizing that there are a variety of perspectives to take into consideration. Anything else going on in that jury room, would you suggest?
I think it's important for us to remember that when the juries make their decisions, it's not a simple averaging of their different demographics and educations and literary tastes. It's a negotiation. It's oftentimes a debate. So as we write in the piece, their social dynamics matter. I mean,
where they went to school, where they got their MFA, who publishes them, if they have an agent in common, if they have a longstanding literary rivalry with another writer, even another writer who looks or writes like them, all of these could affect the decision-making of the jury. And that gold or silver seal on the front of the book actually covers over these much more complex dynamics that are happening in the backroom.
In your article, you referred to Percival Everett's 2001 novel Erasure, which makes some caustic observations regarding the group dynamics of literary prize juries. And the book is the basis of a new film coming out called American Fiction. The
The premise involves a character named Thelonious, quote, Monk Ellison, who writes very obscure literary works. It's oft said in the book, unreadable works. And he can't sell his books.
But he's become aware of this book, Wee's Lives in Da Ghetto, by a woman who went and visited some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days and decided to write a book about the complete black experience. In the end, he decides to write a parody called My Pathology with an F.
I'd be standing outside in the night. Deadbeat dads, rappers, crack. You said you wanted black stuff. That's black, right? I see what you're doing. We sold a book.
No. We believe Mr. Lee has written a bestseller. It's a joke. The most lucrative joke you've ever told. We won't give away the ending, but he's just horrified at the success. No one sees it as a parody. And he is now serving on a panel of the National Book Awards. And one of the works he's asked to judge is his highly parodic, highly offensive, stereotypical novel, My Pathology.
So part of the reason why Monk agrees to be on this award jury in the first place is he says, quote, I detested awards. But as I complained endlessly about the direction of American letters, when presented with an opportunity to affect it, how could I say no? So he wants to be in the room where decisions are being made. But when he gets there, what he finds is that the other judges disagree.
don't really care much for his opinion. He says this book is offensive. It's racist. It speaks to the most base stereotypes about African-Americans. And one of the white judges on the committee says, quote, I should think as an African-American, you'd be happy to see one of your own people get an award like this. I would think you'd be happy to have the story of your people so vividly portrayed.
It's a real moment of confusion about the very question of diversity in contemporary publishing. Mere representation is not the only goal.
When Everett was the only black judge for the National Book Awards, I think it was in 97, the finalists were entirely white, and the winner was Cold Mountain, Charles Fraser's tragic love story about a Confederate soldier and a Southern landowner. Do we know if that prize was unanimous?
The proof is in the pudding of the novel that he wrote after the fact. Obviously, it's not entirely autobiographical. But if we look at Percival Everett's career, he is a writer who has written brilliant and at times esoteric novels and has only recently attained a kind of larger literary fame and the kind of advances and adaptations that his rival novelist in erasure has gotten.
He has won a lot of literary prizes and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer and the Booker Prizes, but finalist, not winner. I want to end on a question about the publishing industry. Many writers of color have observed that selling books often demands writing about trauma, centering that experience. What do you think?
You know, as I write about in my book, the great majority of Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous writers who have won major literary prizes over the last several decades have done so for writing about the historical past and specifically historical trauma. So I think there is some truth to that.
I don't think it's a question of marketability or rather, I guess what I would say, it's something of an assumption about what sells and an assumption about what kind of book counts as literary. And part of the work that these prizes do is they can confirm our expectations about what is literary or they can completely upend it.
All it takes is one particularly independent group of jurors to make a call that completely sends the literary world for a spiral. And sometimes that is a scandal. And sometimes that is a first step in changing the way we think about what is literary.
Thanks very much, Alexander. It's my pleasure. Alexander Manshell is the author of Writing Backwards, Historical Fiction, and the Reshaping of the American Canon. Thanks for checking out the Midweek Podcast. Don't forget The Vic Show, which is posted every Friday. Happy holidays!
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