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IS THE GAME RIGGED?

Why Your Book Won’t Win A Pulitzer No Matter How Good It Is

Even a Simon & Schuster editor thinks rival Penguin Random House will win for ‘James’

Janice Harayda
Lit Life
Published in
7 min readJan 8, 2025

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Photo of a reproduction of the original Pulitzer medal
Reproduction of the original Pulitzer medal / puliter.org

Are the Pulitzers rigged?

As a book critic and former awards judge, I’ve seen the kind of disputes that might make you think so, including the public brawls that erupted when the Pulitzer Board gave no fiction prize in 2012 and when 48 black writers protested that none had gone to Toni Morrison shortly before she won one for Beloved in 1998.

But I’ve never seen an editor at major firm say publicly that the prize will go to a writer published by a rival house. At least, not until I stumbled on a Substack post by Simon & Schuster’s Sean deLone. It said Percival Everett will win the fiction Pulitzer for James, a recasting of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn published by the Doubleday imprint of Penguin Random House.

As it happens, I agree with deLone that James is the frontrunner, though not with his rave for a novel I couldn’t finish. And I appreciate his bravery in speaking out. He’s clearly an editor with something of the fire of the old baseball umpire who liked to say: “I calls ’em like I sees ’em.”

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Lit Life
Lit Life

Published in Lit Life

Book news, reviews and more from an award-winning critic

Janice Harayda
Janice Harayda

Written by Janice Harayda

Critic, novelist, award-winning journalist. Former book editor of the Plain Dealer and book columnist for Glamour. Words in NYT, WSJ, and other major media.

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