A WORTHWHILE CHALLENGE

I can't tell you why I thought up this challenge for myself, or why I accepted the challenge, or why I picked Pulitzer Prize winners, or why I picked fiction...but I did. My goal is to read every Pulitzer Prize winning fiction book published in my lifetime (I was born in 1949). The difficult thing was that, when I began the challenge, it took me longer than it should to get through a book, and initially I wondered if I would catch up to the present before I die. Nevertheless I plugged on, my reading speed increased, and I have now done it. It took about six years to catch up, and now I just look forward to the next winner. Some books, like Faulkner's A Fable, are downright painful to read; but others, like Taylor's The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, are a pure joy. Some are hard to believe they won a Pulitzer Prize, and one begins to wonder just what sort of politics are involved in this honor; but others are life-changing. I now challenge you to take on this reading list, beginning with your birth year. Here's the list from 1949. (Some years had no Pulitzer Prize winner.)

1949 Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens

1950 The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

1951 The Town by Conrad Richter

1952 The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

1953 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

1954 - no winner

1955 A Fable by William Faulkner

1956 Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor

1957 - no winner

1958 A Death in the Family by the late James Agee

1959 The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor

1960 Advise and Consent by Allen Drury

1961 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

1962 The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor

1963 The Reivers by William Faulkner

1964 - no winner

1965 The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau

1966 Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter

1967 The Fixer by Bernard Malamud

1968 The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

1969 House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

1970 Collected Stories by Jean Stafford

1971 - no winner

1972 Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

1973 The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

1974 - no winner

1975 The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

1976 Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

1977 - no winner

1978 Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson

1979 The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever

1980 The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

1981 A Confederacy of Dunces by the late John Kennedy Toole

1982 Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker

1984 Ironweed by William Kennedy

1985 Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie

1986 Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

1987 A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor

1988 Beloved by Toni Morrison

1989 Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

1990 The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos

1991 Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

1992 A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

1993 A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler

1994 The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx

1995 The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

1996 Independence Day by Richard Ford

1997 Martin Dressler: Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser

1998 American Pastoral by Philip Roth

1999 The Hours by Michael Cunningham

2000 Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

2001 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

2002 Empire Falls by Richard Russo

2003 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

2004 The Known World by Edward P. Jones

2005 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

2006 March by Geraldine Brooks

2007 The Road by Cormac McCarthy

2008 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

2009 Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

2010 Tinkers by Paul Harding

2011 A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2012 - no winner

2013 The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

2014 The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
2015 All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
2016 The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
2017 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
2018 Less by Andrew Sean Greer
I have stopped with Greer's Less. I congratulate my fortitude of reaching as far as page 15. The homosexuality in more recent Pulitzer winners has just become boring and disgusting to me. It's best to be happy with having read all of them from 1949 to 2017. Now I've got several more of Clyde Brion Davis' books to read instead. They're out of print and didn't receive any Pulitzer prizes, but they're plenty good enough.

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