• U.S.

Press: Atlantic Award

2 minute read
TIME

Biggest single publishing award open to aspiring authors is the fat old Atlantic Monthly’s annual $10,000 prize. First and most famed beneficiary was Canada’s Mazo de la Roche, whose Jalna won in 1927. Last week another woman writer was similarly enriched when Mrs. Winifred Mayne Van Etten, 34, of Mt. Vernon, Iowa, received the 1936 Atlantic prize for a novel called I Am the Fox, which the Atlantic Monthly Press will issue in August.

Like many another U. S. literary prizewinner, slender little Mrs. Van Etten had done no previous professional writing, turned out a regional story as her first big job. After winning an M.A. at Columbia in 1928, Mrs. Van Etten returned to Mt. Vernon to teach at Cornell College, where she had been graduated three years before, learned about her native State by helping a county nurse make a survey of rural bathing habits. She began I Am the Fox after arguing with her husband about whether foxes object to being hunted, finished it because of the “relentless goading and browbeating” of Cornell’s Professor Clyde Tull, who knew Mrs. Van Etten could write because he had taught her how.

When told she had won, Mrs. Van Etten jiggled the cigaret lighter on her car, burned her thumb. Planning to save part of the $10,000, she remarked, “I don’t suppose it would be possible to repeat right away on a thing like this,” went to work on a second novel.

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