Celebrating American Writers

THE FIRST LADY OF PEN/FAULKNER Celebrating American Writers Janice Delaney In 1986 Mary Lee Settle wrote a novel called Celebration, and in 1987 she came to the Folger Shakespeare Library to read from it to benefit the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She inscribed a copy of the book to me that night, saying "for Janice, who does all this so that it becomes a celebration too," telling me that I was properly carrying out her plan for letting writers know their value. A few years earlier Mary Lee had, in a burst of anger-fueled inspiration, created the PEN/ Faulkner Award in Charlottesville, Virginia, then propelled it with her charisma and charm to Washington, DC, convincing the directors of the Folger Library that Shakespeare's legacy could rest comfortably on the shoulders of the finest writers of fiction in America, and that they could stand easily on his. Mary Lee's celebration of American writers began sometime in 1979, when the revered National Book Award (NBA) morphed into The American Book Award (TABA), a short-lived revenue-dependent plaything of the powerful New York publishers, not to be confused with the contemporaryAmericanBookAward. Having won a National Book Award in 1978 for Blood Tie, Mary Lee knew how valuable book prizes could be to their winners. Authors receive a little money, a lot of attention, increased sales, a bigger advance for the next book, and possibly a remunerative appointment to a university writing program. The National Book Awards, which had been judged by peer-review panels, also added to writers' material rewards the respect of their fellow scribes. When the publishers who funded the NBA and TABA decided to raise the potential for prize-generated sales, they expanded the number of prize categories from seven to twenty-five, including separate awards for hard-cover and paperback editions, and added genres such as Science Fiction, Westerns, Religion/Inspiration, General Reference, and Mystery. The peer-review panels were replaced by groups of judges which included publicists, librarians and others connected with the industry, whose recommendations were voted upon by the approximately 2000 members of the American Publishing Association. To Mary Lee this situation cheapened the National Book Award she 60 had proudly accepted, and compromised the value of future awards to writers of fiction. So she drew on the good will and artistic integrity of fellow writers Eudora Welty, James Alan McPherson, Walker Percy, John Casey and others to create PEN/South, a branch of PEN (a collapsed acronym for "Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists"), the US center of the international organization devoted to supporting writers' freedoms, and persuaded the University of Virginia to provide logistical support. William Faulkner had given his Nobel Prize money to fund a prize for new writers, so his legacy was linked to this new award to emphasize its writer-to-writer orientation, its public honoring of a writer by his peers. The first board of advisors to the PEN/Faulkner award included Saul Bellow, Alison Lurie, Wallace Stegner, Peter Taylor and William Styron, under the leadership of Bernard Malamud, PEN American Center's President in 1980. The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction was twice presented in Charlottesville, in 1981 to Walter Abish for How German Is It? and 1982 to David Bradley for The Chaneysville Incident. Writers enthusiastically embraced the new prize, volunteering to be judges and advisors, committing their time and their money to honor excellence in fiction, wherever it was published, whether at Random House or Coffee House or a university press. But eschewing Big Publishing's influence did not mean forswearing fiscal health. The prize needed the support of an independent foundation, to give it national visibility and a vehicle for raising money. Washington DC was far enough away from New York, geographically and culturally, to obviate competition with PEN for funding, and the Folger Shakespeare Library lent the cachet of the ultimate literary link. Celebration of the nation's best fiction writers moved north, to a big Washington party in the spring of 1983, when Toby Olson became the third winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award with Seaview. In Washington as in Charlottesville, "celebration" was both description and definition of...