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the
current
Monday
Report
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This week's report by Adam Hardin
Profiles in Fraud:
JFK and the Pulitzer Prize
There has been a deluge of literary Milli Vanillis, in the past
year. James Frey, noted pathological liar, gave us a work of
fiction that he claimed was a memoir, and was thrown under the
bus by his great former benefactor, Miss Oprah Winfrey.
J.T. Leroy, once hyped as a very gifted young man who was able
to produce mature works of literary fiction, is not a young man,
but a middle age woman, Laura Albert. For good measure,
Albert and her boyfriend, Geoffrey Knoop (not to be confused
with Knopf) created the persona Leroy as a HIV+, trans-
gendered, sexually abused, former truck-stop prostitute as to not
leave out anything that would make for a good sleezy movie or
play to a sense of pity. Leroy’s second book was “The Heart is
above all deceitful.” Harvard Freshman Kaavya Viswanathan,
signed on to a six-figure two-book deal at the age of 19 for her
chick lit, only to have her first book pulled from the shelves and
her contract nullified because this brilliant Harvard student
plagiarized two other chick lit authors. If she was so brilliant,
why was she writing chick lit?
Likewise in the past few years, there has been a rampant
discovery that many smaller literary contests are complete
frauds, and many awards that are not contests are also of
questionable merit, and in the case where a contest solicits money
for entry fees from the public, the fraud becomes a federal crime.
Who can forget Brown Professor C.D. Wright rigging the
Contemporary Georgia Poetry Series:
In 2003, C.D. Wright chose two manuscripts. One was The Blaze
of Poui, by Mark McMorris, who just happens to have both an
M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from Brown University. The second was a
manuscript entitled Vertical Elegies 5 by Sam Truitt, his second
book to be published. Sam has an M.F.A. from Brown University.
Sam Truitt’s first book was Anamorphosis Eisenhower which just
happened to be published by Wright’s Lost Roads Press in 1998.
There is also the case of Jorie Graham giving her lover Peter
Sacks (husband one year later) the same prize, and in exchange,
Jorie was appointed to the prestigious Boylston Professorship at
Harvard where Sacks is a Professor. Jorie has a long record of
giving prizes to her former students, and even gave a prize to the
babysitter of her daughter. There is no word on what became of
the literary ambitions of her gardener. The phrase, “Jorie
Graham Rule,” was coined for rules that are adopted by contests
to prevent this kind of blatant nepotism. What can also be coined
is the “Jorie Graham Professorship,” whereas one becomes a
Professor by having a two-year liaise-faire M.F.A. degree
without the rigorous six years of academic work required by the
Ph.D.
Sometimes there are fake awards that are just created to give
people awards, as in the case of the Believer Magazine’s Award
which has no prize money, no nomination process, no judging
panel except the editors, but the first award was given to a Sam
Lipsyte, Columbia University colleague of Believer editor Heidi
Julavits’s husband. There is no real crime here, except the
attempt of a magazine to bullshit its readership.
Sometimes there is just an outright attempt to publish as many
friends and students as possible, as in the case of Columbia
University Professor Richard Howard, as Poetry Editor of the
Paris Review, who was given the boot last year. Not only did he
give the Bernard F. Conners Poetry Prize every year to a former
colleague or student, but he had promised, years in advance,
publication in the Paris Review to so many poets, that the Paris
Review had to rescind many of their acceptances. Richard
Howard had his hands on the Zoo Press Poetry Prize as well, and
now that Press in light of his machinations has folded.
There are too many fraudulent contests to name here, and there
are so many more interesting stories to tell, but let’s get to the
big question. In the wake of all this, could the Pulitzer Prize, the
most prestigious writing award in America, overseen by
Columbia University, be subject to fraud? It already has been.
In 1954, JFK, a first-term Senator with his eyes on the White
House, was recuperating from back surgery when he decided to
write a book. At that point, the young Kennedy was not seen as a
serious Presidential contender because of his age, and his rather
privileged background, so it was no coincidence that the young
Kennedy decided to write about the courage of some Senators, in
an effort to win over his colleagues as a serious man for
Democratic leadership.
Kennedy himself was the big idea man, but the work of writing,
drafting, and research fell upon his speechwriter Ted Sorenson,
under the direction of Kennedy. In the Literary World, this is
called ghostwriting, and Sorenson, was not credited as being the
author, or even the co-author, but was only acknowledged in the
book as a research associate. Historian Herbert Parmet in his
book Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy, lays out the proof
that the real author of the book was Sorenson, and furthermore,
after this fact was made public by columnist Drew Pearson who
said, “Jack Kennedy is . . . the only man in history that I know
who won a Pulitzer prize on a book which was ghostwritten for
him,” Kennedy got out his powerful Washington Lawyer, the
famous Clark Clifford, to defend himself. Kennedy’s only defense
was his handwritten notes, and an affidavit by his friend
Sorenson.
“There is no evidence of a Kennedy draft for the overwhelming
bulk of the book," Parmet writes. While "the choices, message,
and tone of the volume are unmistakably Kennedy's," the actual
work was "left to committee labor." The "literary craftsmanship
[was] clearly Sorensen's, and he gave the book both the drama
and flow that made for readability." Parmet reviewed thousands
of notes and documents in what is accepted as the most thorough
research done on this historical question.
But then there is the question of how this book came to win the
1957 Pulitzer Prize. In order to win the Pulitzer Prize, a book has
to be nominated by a small group of judges, and the nominations
are then reviewed by the selection committee which makes the
final determination. The fact is that Profiles in Courage was
never officially nominated by the judges. It is thought that Joe
Kennedy, a very powerful man in the United States at that time,
used his influence to get his son’s book to the selection committee
as he knew the Pulitzer would give his son’s book the momentum
it needed. Profiles in Courage was considered light reading when
compared to the heavy scholarly biographies it was up against
written by real historians.
In the annals of irony, the book which was fraudulently awarded
the Pulitzer Prize, now sponsors an award itself. The Profiles in
Courage award is given every year to a politician who displays
the qualities JFK told Sorenson to write about. Another degree
of irony is that the winners of the award are chosen by a
committee from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. If you
want an answer to this, how could this go on, maybe you should
consult a poem by the queen of literary fraud, Jorie Graham,
entitled, “The way things work.”
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Adam Hardin lives in Illinois. He joined the ULA in 2005.
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