Pulitzer at last for Bellow

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34146, 6 May 1976, Page 9

Pulitzer at last for Bellow

(By

PETER KISS.

of the New York Times News Service,

through N.Z.P.A.)

NEW YORK. Saul Bellow, who once lost a Pulitzer Prize for fiction despite a jury’s recommendation, has captured the premier award for his latest novel, “Humboldt’s Gift,” and “A Chorus Line” has won the prize for drama.

Journalism Pulitzer Prizes went to two staff members of the “New York Times” — Sydney Schanberg for his courageous coverage of the Communist take-over and uprooting of people in Cambodia and Walter Wellesley (Red) Smith for commentary, writing a distinguished sports column. The “Anchorage Daily News,” with a news staff of only 20 and a circulation of 16,500, won the gold medal for public service for its arduous investigation into the growth and influence of the Teamsters’ Union on Alaska’s economy and politics.

In addition to 11 journalism and seven other prizes in letters, drama, and music, a special award in the nation's bi-centennial year for contributions to American music was announced for Scott Joplin, the onetime “king of ragtime” — 59 years after he died penniless and mentally ill. A Pulitzer jury made up of the critics, John Hutchens and Thomas Sherman, recommended the fiction prize in 1960 for Bellow’s

novel, “Henderson the Rain King,” but the advisory board on the Pulitzer Prizes set the jury’s report aside entirely and handed the prize to a book the jury had not even mentioned, Allen Drury’s “Advise and Consent.”

In "Humboldt’s Gift,” the narrator, Charlie Citrine, is a two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner who nevertheless says he agrees with Humboldt, the book’s chief character, a poet, when Humboldt observes: “The Pulitzer is for the birds — for the pullets. It’s just a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates. You become a walking Pulitzer ad, so even when you croak the first word of the obituary is ‘Pulitzer Prizewinner passes’.” Bellow, at his home in Chicago, chuckled when those words were recalled. Of the prize’s finally coming his way, he said. “I think I should accept it in dignified silence and say nothing. Of course I’m pleased, tickled, amused.”