Brooke Gladstone: This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. In a couple of weeks, the final red carpet of the season will be rolled out for the Academy Awards. If you know where to look, you'll see that the ceremony and the films it honors is shaped by another less glitzy award circuit in the publishing industry. Several Oscar favorites are adapted for much-celebrated books like Oppenheimer, inspired by a Pulitzer Prize-winning history published in 2005 by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

[video excerpt]

Male Speaker: You are the man who gave them the power to destroy themselves and the world is not prepared.

Brooke Gladstone: Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon was based on a nonfiction national book award finalist, written by journalist David Grand back in 2017.

Movie clip: They call it the Flower Moon when tiny flowers spread over the Black Jack Hills and the prairies. There are many, so many.

Brooke Gladstone: Novels also cast a long shadow on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. The new adaptation of The Color Purple, based on Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize and national book award-winning novel, has collected a string of nominations this season.

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Movie clip: Celie is coming to Memphis with us. It's time she saw more of this world.

Movie clip: [chuckles] I'd die before I let that happen.

Movie clip: Good. That's just a gone-away present Imma need.

Brooke Gladstone: Then there's the film, American Fiction, based on Percival Everett's 2001 novel, Erasure. According to Alexander Manshel, assistant professor of English at McGill University, the influence of prize-winning novels extends to TV too.

Alexander Manshel: In the last few years alone, we've seen a number of prize-winning novels or even novels that have just been shortlisted for a major literary award being adapted to Prestige TV and to film. I'm thinking here of books like The Underground Railroad, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer by Colson Whitehead. A Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. More recently, Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer.

Movie clip: I know that broadcasting could get me executed, but I will not be silenced. I hope you'll tune in again tomorrow.

Alexander Manshel: This is one of those things where the production companies and the streamers themselves look not only at the sales that have already occurred, but at things like prestige as denoted by literary awards to signal not only what people are interested in, but what is taken to be literary. Part of the way that Prestige TV gets its prestige is by borrowing the literary prestige from novels like these.

Brooke Gladstone: With Melanie Walsh, Manshel wrote a piece for the magazine, public books titled, What 35 Years of Data Can Tell Us About Who Will Win The National Book Award. He says these prizes actually matter a lot.

Alexander Manshel: Even just finalists for these prizes are more likely to be read, taught, and studied, and the ones that win get an even bigger boost.

Brooke Gladstone: Here, Manshel cites a study he co-wrote with Laura B. McGrath and J.D. Porter called, Who Cares About Literary Prizes?

Alexander Manshel: We looked at hundreds of high-profile 21st-century novels and we found that the number of Good Reads ratings, which is a proxy for readership, jumps from 48,000 for a book that is not even shortlisted to 98,000 for a book that wins. The same is true on university syllabi. The average book, even a high-profile book is taught a grand total of zero times in a university classroom, but it ends up on as many as 15 syllabi on average when it wins.

Brooke Gladstone: What about sales?

Alexander Manshel: We don't have good publicly available data on sales, so we have to use these other proxies for readership to figure that out. Of course, sales don't always tell us about what people are actually reading. If you take the time to leave a good reads rating or review, or to study it over a week in a course, that's far more engagement than, as we can all relate to, buying a book and never actually cracking the spine.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm reminded of a story back in 1985 when the great Michael Kinsley, then editor of the New Republic, put coupons for $5 in the back of 70 copies of a couple of Washington doorstops. Unsurprisingly, no one ever claimed the $5 because they never got that far.

Alexander Manshel: [laughs] I love this. Brooke, I have a bunch of friends who live in New York City, and if I had a dime for every one of them that has a copy of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, somewhere in their apartment I'd be a wealthy man.

Brooke Gladstone: People love to talk about prizes, especially when there's an upset. Tell me about the most objected-to award decision of the past half-century, The National Book Award of 1987.

Alexander Manshel: As I argue in my book, Toni Morrison's Beloved is the single most celebrated contemporary American novel. It's among the most widely read, written about, and admired works of the last half-century. In 1987, Beloved was nominated for the National Book Award, but it was ultimately passed over in favor of Larry Heinemann's Vietnam War novel Paco's Story. Jonathan Yardley wrote in The Washington Post, "You couldn't have cut the collective astonishment with a machete. That's how startled were the assembled Illuminati. Truman over Dewey was nothing as to Heinemann over Morrison. Then over at The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani opened her review with just two words, "What happened?"

Brooke Gladstone: The rumor was that the sole Black judge on the judging panel was a vote against Beloved.

Alexander Manshel: This was the rumor at the time that it was a split decision, the result of a two-to-one vote. Now there were three at that time, judges, on the National Book Award jury, the critic Richard Eder and the Novelists, Hilma Wolitzer and Gloria Naylor, who is the judge you're referring to. Wolitzer was later quoted as saying it was an agonizing decision. Eder had on the one hand, given Paco's Story a positive review in The LA Times where he worked, and he had only written a short piece on Beloved as part of a larger article, but Naylor, the only Black judge on the jury, was rumored to have voted against Beloved.

After Beloved was passed over for the National Book Award, a group of 50 Black writers, critics, and scholars took out an open letter in The New York Times to protest the decision by the prize. One of the signatories of that letter, June Jordan, ultimately withdrew a creative writing fellowship for Gloria Naylor. She said that it would be "embarrassing and morally elliptical" for Naylor to take up that position, but still, we have to say in the room where literary history is being made, very little is known.

Brooke Gladstone: What did you learn in your research about the juries that decide which books will win the big prizes?

Alexander Manshel: Because we can never know for sure exactly what happens in the room, we wanted to figure out at least who was there. We drew on 35 years of data and one of the first things we found is just how much influence is held by a very small number of people.

Brooke Gladstone: How small?

Alexander Manshel: Well, over the last 35 years, for example, when it comes to the Pulitzer Prize, just five people have made up more than 20% of all the jurors. If you add another five names to that list, it's more than a third of all jurors. These people are mostly professional reviewers. Gail Caldwell at the Boston Globe, Richard Eder at The LA Times, Marie Arana at The Washington Post, these people have judged the Pulitzer four, six, even seven times over the past 35 years. Eder is a particularly interesting example because he was on the National Book Award jury that ultimately passed over Toni Morrison for the 1987 award, but less than a year later, he was on the Pulitzer jury that ultimately resulted in Morrison getting the award for the same book.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's move on to how the prizes have changed over the years. In 2023, the jury for the National Book Award was the most diverse ever, and its shortlist has been among the most diverse too.

Alexander Manshel: Absolutely. To put this in perspective, in the few years after Morrison's Beloved was published, the late 1980s, only around 15% of judges for these prizes were people of color. In 16 of the last 35 years, the nominating jury for the Pulitzer did not include a single person of color. If we skip ahead to the last few years, people of color have made up more than half of the juries for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

Brooke Gladstone: Should we assume that the more judges of color are appointed, the more there'll be authors of color winning prizes?

Alexander Manshel: Both of those things have occurred over the past several decades except, here's where things get interesting, on the scale of the individual year, a more diverse jury doesn't necessarily yield a more diverse group of finalists. We found two different things. One is that there is not as close a correlation between the jury's demographics and the shortlist demographics, but there is a tighter correlation between the diversity of the jury and who ultimately wins.

It's true, we found that when the jury was composed only of white judges, they selected a white winner every single time. We also found that there was a correlation between more and more judges of color and the likelihood that that jury would select a writer of color as their winner. If there is a Black or Asian American writer named a finalist for these awards, there is about half the time not a Black or Asian American judge on the committee. It's not a simple exercise in identification.

Part of what we're seeing in this data is when you're sitting in a room that reminds you that your perspective is just one of many perspectives, that leads to a wider variety of writers being celebrated by the prizes. It's important to have a diverse group of jurors, not just because they are somehow automatically going to select a diverse group of winners, but because there is a wide variety of literary taste in this country, and there is a great diversity of readers.

Brooke Gladstone: You have the dynamics in the jury room, people looking around and realizing that there are a variety of perspectives to take into consideration. Anything else going on in that jury room?

Alexander Manshel: Their social dynamics matter, where they went to school, where they got their MFA, who publishes them, if they have an agent in common, if they have a longstanding literary rivalry with another writer, even another writer who looks or writes like them, all of these could affect the decision making of the jury. That gold or silver seal on the front of the book covers over these much more complex dynamics that are happening in the back room.

Brooke Gladstone: In your article, you referred to Perceval Everett's 2001 novel Erasure, which makes some caustic observations regarding the group dynamics of literary prize juries. The main character is a Black writer and educator named Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, whose [unintelligible 00:28:42] involves very literary, oft-called unreadable works and he can't sell his books, but he's become aware of this book We's Lives In Da Ghetto by a woman who visited some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days and decided to write a book about the complete Black experience. In the end, he decides to write a parody called My Pafology with an F.

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Arthur: We sold a book?

Monk: No.

Female Speaker 1: We believe Mr. Lee has written the bestseller.

Monk: It's a joke.

Arthur: The most lucrative joke you've ever told.

Brooke Gladstone: That's from the film adaptation, American Fiction. He's just horrified at the success. No one sees it as a parody, and he is now serving on a panel of the National Book Awards.

Alexander Manshel: Part of the reason why Monk agrees to be on this award jury in the first place is he says, "I detested awards, but as I complained endlessly about the direction of American letters when presented with an opportunity to affect it, how could I say no?" When he gets there, what he finds is that the other judges don't really care much for his opinion, and one of the works he's asked to judge is My Pafology. He says this book is offensive. It's racist. It speaks to the most base stereotypes about African Americans. One of the white judges on the committee says, "I should think as an African American, you'd be happy to see one of your own people get an award like this. I would think you'd be happy to have the story of your people so vividly portrayed."

Brooke Gladstone: When Everett was the only Black judge for the National Book Awards. I think it was in '97, the finalists were entirely white, and the winner was Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier's tragic love story about a Confederate soldier and a Southern landowner. Do we know if that prize was unanimous?

Alexander Manshel: The proof is in the pudding of the novel that he wrote after the fact. Obviously, it's not entirely autobiographical, but if we look at Percival Everett's career, he is a writer who has written brilliant and at times esoteric novels and has only recently attained larger literary fame and the kind of advances and adaptations that his rival novelist in Erasure has gotten.

Brooke Gladstone: He has won a lot of literary prizes and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer and the Booker prizes, but finalist, not winner. Many writers of color have observed that selling books often demands writing about trauma, centering that experience, what do you think?

Alexander Manshel: As I write about in my book, the great majority of Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous writers who have won major literary prizes over the last several decades, have done so for writing about historical trauma. Part of the work that these prizes do is, they can confirm our expectations about what is literary, or they can completely upend it. All it takes is one particularly independent group of jurors to make a call that completely sends the literary world for a spiral. Sometimes that is a scandal, and sometimes that is a first step in changing the way we think about what is literary.

Brooke Gladstone: Thanks very much, Alexander.

Alexander Manshel: It's my pleasure.

Brooke Gladstone: Alexander Manshel is the author of Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon. Coming up, we pick up the story with the writer and director of American Fiction Cord Jefferson. This is On the Media.

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