Pulitzer Prizes

Until Columbia University's trustees began to consume a Manhattan banquet last week, they scrupulously refused to emit the names of those to whom they had decided to award the annual Pulitzer Prizes lor Journalism and for belles-lettres.

Correspondence. For his dispatches from the losing side of the Ethiopian War, Wilfred Courtenay ("Will") Barber of the Chicago Tribune was posthumously awarded $500. First U. S. newshawk to get into the country after hostilities started, 31-year-old Correspondent Barber sickened after three months, died in Ogaden last October of tertian malaria, nephritis, influenza, was buried on a hill in Addis Ababa (TIME, Oct. 14).

Reporting. Best reporting job the Pulitzer judges spotted this year was turned in by spectacled Lauren D. ("Deac") Lyman of the New York Times, who learned of the Lindberghs' flight to England, kept it a secret four days, scooped the country after they put to sea (TIME, Jan. 6). Exclusive publication of this big story was regarded as a personal favor from Colonel Lindbergh to Reporter Lyman. who in 1927 made the Times's first contact with obscure young Aviator Lindbergh before he flew to Paris. Reporter Lyman is $1,000 richer for his pains.

Public Service by a newspaper was best exemplified, the judges thought, by the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette, which went out of its own bailiwick to expose political corruption in Sioux City & environs. Crusading Editor Verne Marshall prodded the legislature and the Woodbury County (Sioux City) grand jury into investigating connivance between law-breakers and officials (TIME, Sept. 30). Result was the conviction of the chairman of the State Liquor Commission for illegally disposing of State liquor seals, suspension of Sioux City's mayor and the resignations under fire of the Woodbury County attorney and public safety commissioner. As higher-ups were smoked out, at. one time three members of Governor Clyde LaVerne Herring's cabinet were under indictment. One was tried and acquitted, another's case was dismissed, and the third is still trying to have his indictment quashed.

For this feat the Gazette may henceforth display a big gold Pulitzer plaque.

Letters. Pulitzer novel of the year was Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis (TIME, Aug. 26), a long, humorous, color ful account of pioneer days in Oregon, where Author Davis was born 40 years ago. Harold Davis was the first winner of the Harper Novel Prize ($7,500) to cash in on a Pulitzer award ($1,000) as well.

Poems of the year appeared in Strange Holiness by Robert Peter Tristram Coffin. Hefty, curly-haired Poet Coffin is 44, a professor of English at Wells College, Aurora, N. Y. He boasts of having versified simultaneously for popular Ladies' Home Journal and the highbrow Nation.

Historical study of the year proved to have been Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin's weighty Constitutional History of the United States.

Biography of the year, Ralph Barton Perry's The Thought and Character of William James, was the account by a Harvard Philosophy professor of Harvard's famed Psychology professor.

Drama prize went to the tallest play wright ever to be so honored, lanky Rob ert Emmet Sherwood (The Road to Rome, Reunion in Vienna, The Petrified Forest for his anti-war melodrama Idiot's Delight (TIME, April 6). Generally the subject of violent differences of opinion, the drama award, for once, resulted in no serious dispute between the regular critics and the Pulitzer volunteers.

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