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Strange Decision. Some participants in this year's Pulitzer decisions suggested that the cumbersome mechanism for selecting winners could also stand some investigatory reporting. In each category, individual juries make recommendations to the advisory board, which consists largely of publishers and editors. They are free to veto the recommendations or insert other choices; the university's trustees can then override the advisory board's selections but cannot make substitutions. This Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance arrangement can yield some strange decisions. The jurors in this year's fiction category −Amherst Professor Benjamin DeMott and Critics Elizabeth Hardwick and Alfred Kazin−recommended Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (recent co-winner of the National Book Award). Said their report: "No work of fiction published in 1973 begins to compare in scale, originality and sustained intellectual interest with Mr. Pynchon's book."
Some newsmen on the board disagreed. "It was confusing and confused, written in incomprehensible language," said one. As a result, the board recommended that no fiction prize be given, a decision that DeMott learned about when he read his morning paper on the day after the awards were announced. "I must admit I did not fill up with a sense of purposeful work as a juror," DeMott says. "Why did we read those books?" Leaving in their wake angry jurors, confused advisers and troubled trustees, the Pulitzers again managed to annoy almost everyone−except the winners.