Drama Pulitzer, 2

Drama Pulitzer, 2

Actually, the foolish choices for Pulitzer for Drama go back further and are more embarrassing than Leonard suggests. In the 1931-32 season, the Pulitzer went to Of Thee I Sing over O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. By the sixties several unlikely musicals had won over significant plays (e.g., Fiorello over A Raisin in the Sun, The Miracle Worker, The Tenth Man, and Sweet Bird of Youth). But my favorite year for Pulitzer decisions is 1947 for which there was no award, although quite a few plays opened then on Broadway which were superior to many previous winners: Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest, and Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine. And the musicals included two better than the ones which in other years won the Pulitzer: Brigadoon and Finian’s Rainbow. Nothing worth the award that year? I’d say that on the whole, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama has a mostly embarrassing record.

— Herb Simpson