Prize Mother

In the little Jacobs house in Bay St. Louis, Miss, there was vast commotion one day last week. Telephone and doorbell buzzed like mad, neighbors flew in & out, tongues clacked incessantly. Mrs. Jacobs rang up her husband at his tollhouse on the Pontchartrain Bridge, spoke breathlessly. Stuttering with excitement, he relayed her message by long distance to his two daughters at Louisiana State University, who shrilled the great news through their dormitory. It was three days before Christmas. It was Mrs. Jacobs' 44th birthday. It was also her 22nd wedding anniversary. But none of these pleasant milestones was the cause of the Jacobs' rejoicing. What had happened was that in far-off Manhattan the judges of the Bodd, Mead-Pictorial Review 1935 novel contest had awarded their $10,000 prize to one Margaret Flint. And Margaret Flint was Mrs. Lester Warner Jacobs' maiden name.

Quickly the Jacobs family forgathered, jubilantly celebrated Christmas, birthday, anniversary, then packed their heroine off to Manhattan and glory. At her publishers' tea there Author Margaret Flint, swelling with pleased pride and a corsage of tea-roses, looked more than ever like Mrs. Jacobs of Bay St. Louis. One of her sponsors, in helpful vein, asked if she felt like a butterfly on a pin. "Rather a weighty butterfly," smiled 200-lb. Margaret Flint Jacobs. With five of her six children at home and a husband whose toll-bridge had been rendered bankrupt by Huey Long's free bridges, Author Flint let it be known she was in Manhattan for business, not pleasure. "What am I going to do with the money? Well, with five children to educate that is easy to answer. I'm going to spend it for that. No, I'm not going to buy a car." After gathering in her check and her roses she planned to pay a brief visit to Maine relatives, then head for home.

Last week's was not Author Flint's first literary prize. As a young newshen on the Old Town, Me., Enterprise, she had won a $12 prize for a piece on the operation and care of sewing machines. The article, though, was not run. After that she married a fellow-graduate of the University of Maine and went South to be a mother, cook, seamstress, smalltown housewife. But she never got over her ambition to be a writer as well. She ground out short stories. They were all rejected. In late-at-night, snatched moments over four years she slowly tapped out a novel. It was about a Maine farm, the kind of country she had grown up in. She called it The Old Ashburn Place. One of her daughters read a few pages, did not like it much. Her husband was no hand for fiction anyway, preferred the Bible. But when the book was finished, off she sent it to Pictorial Review, where it will begin to appear serially next May.

Not every U. S. author these days has a chicken in his pot, but authorship need no longer rhyme with garret. In fact, so eager are U. S. publishers to welcome a new best-seller that they go out into the highways and advertise that the fatted calf is dressed and ready. U. S. publishers vend three notably fat calves for fiction. A good practising U. S. writer, who published his first novel less than 14 years ago, has a chance for Harper & Brothers' $7,500 prize, plus royalties. Harper winners have been by far the most capable novelists among U. S. contest-addicts: Anne Parrish (The Perennial Bachelor), Glenway Wescott (The Grandmothers), Julian Green (The Dark Journey). The 1935 shindig was won by Harold L. Bavis' Honey In the Horn (TIME, Aug. 26). Anybody at all has a chance for the Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown & Co. $5,000 prize, plus advance royalties of $5,000. The first contest was won in 1927 by Jalna, which proved a gold mine for the publishers and its author, Mazo de la Roche. Since then Boston's good money has been won by obscure contestants who did nothing remarkable thereafter. Any writer who has never published a novel has a chance for the Bodd, Mead & Co.-Pictorial Review $10,000. Since Martha Ostenso first carried away the prize in 1925 with her Wild Geese, the contest has added little to U. S. literature.

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