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| Short Story Collection Wins Pulitzer Prize | |
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The Pulitzer Prize awards were introduced in 1917 and for the first 30 years, the award for literary works of fiction was given under the title "Novel." Despite such title, in 1966, the Pulitzer Prize was bestowed upon Katherine Anne Porter's Collected Stories. This award, the first given to a collection of stories, came at the end of this writer's career -- Porter was 76-years-old at the time. In the book, The Pulitzer Prize Archive, Heinz-Dietrich Fischer quotes John Hohenberg on this decision by the Pulitzer jury at that time: "...(it is) a commentary on the state of the American novel when a book of short stories was selected for the fiction award in the fiftieth year of the Pulitzer Prizes." Luckily, times have changed since that first award to Porter's Collected Stories, and the title of the Pulitzer literary award has changed from that of "Novel" to "Fiction," thus allowing short story collections since that time to vie for the award on equal ground with novels. No longer are outcries heard over the state of the novel when a short story collection wins the Pulitzer as has been witnessed with regard to Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, for which the only outcry heard was that of brilliance. |
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UPDATE: |
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| Director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay) adapted the Jhumpa Lahiri short story "A Temporary Matter" for PBS. |
on Interpreter of Maladies:Some of these nine tales are set in India, others in the United States, and most concern characters of Indian heritage. Yet the situations Lahiri's people face, from unhappy marriages to civil war, transcend ethnicity. As the narrator of the last story, "The Third and Final Continent," comments: "There are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept." In that single line Jhumpa Lahiri sums up a universal experience, one that applies to all who have grown up, left home, fallen in or out of love, and, above all, experienced what it means to be a foreigner, even within one's own family. --Alix Wilber, ©Amazon.com
| Short stories | |
| & the Pulitzer Prize | |
| 1966> | Katherine Anne Porter's Collected Stories |
| 1970> | Jean Stafford's Collected Stories |
| 1978> | Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson |
| 1979> | The Stories of John Cheever |
| 1993> | Good Scent from a Strange Mountain : Stories |
| by Robert Olen Butler | |
| 2000> | Interpreter of Maladies, stories by Jhumpa Lahiri |
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| RELATED INTEREST |
| The South Asian Women's NETwork provides an expansive list of resources on Jhumpa Lahiri.
The Pulitzer Prizes (official site) |
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