The Pulitzer committee asked three jurors to recommend a play for the 1920 prize in drama. One juror favored an English playwright. Another left for a western lecture tour and was scarcely reachable. And the third considered the prospect of giving the prize to an Englishman “a betrayal of trust (and) a defeat of the purpose of the contest.”
In the end a jury that seemed destined to fail righted itself. It recommended Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon for the prize, and the Pulitzer committee gave it to him. For O’Neill, it was the first of four Pulitzer Prizes. The others came in 1922 (Anna Christie), 1928 (Strange Interlude) and 1957 (Long Day’s Journey into Night).
The 1920 jurors were Hamlin Garland, a New York writer and the committee’s chair; Richard Burton, a transplanted New Englander who chaired the English department at the University of Minnesota; and Walter P. Eaton, a New York drama critic who also taught at Yale.
Garland suggested that the prize go to Abraham Lincoln by John Drinkwater, an Englishman. The play moved from London to New York in 1919. Frank McGlynn, who had portrayed Lincoln in the D.W. Griffith film Birth of a Nation, played the title role on Broadway.
The Pulitzer plan of award did not exactly prohibit a play by an Englishman from winning. The prize was to be awarded to “the original American play, performed in New York, which shall best represent the educational value and power of the stage in raising the standards of good morals, good taste and good manners.”
On Feb. 6, as soon as he heard Garland’s idea, Eaton shot back a scalding critique.
“The public supposes these prizes to be given for the encouragement of American writers,” Eaton wrote. He added that Drinkwater’s Lincoln was no more an American play than Romeo and Juliet was an Italian play.
Garland, by then wintering in Florida, brought the matter to the attention of Frank Fackenthal, the Columbia secretary, who oversaw the Pulitzer juries. The jury’s dispute, Garland wrote, might be just the wakeup call American dramatists needed. “Perhaps a lively ‘row’ would call attention to the failure of our writers or producers or who ever is to blame in the matter.”
Fackenthal wanted a recommendation, not a row. In mid-April, he began pestering Garland for the jury’s choice.
Garland dallied. He asked Fackenthal if he had seen Percy McKaye’s Washington, the Man Who Made Us. Garland had not seen it himself, but his wife had liked it. After reading the script, he pronounced it the only eligible play with “beauty and dignity of appeal.”
Garland also tried to dampen enthusiasm for O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon. He found it “a powerful piece of work” but questioned O’Neill’s intentions. “I’m not sure of the man’s motive. It seemed to me ruthless for the sake of ruthlessness.”
Possibly it was Fackenthal who called in reinforcements. Montrose Moses, a well-known author, and Clayton Hamilton, a Columbia University lecturer, both lobbied Garland to support the O’Neill play.
Burton, the third Drama juror, had gone west to lecture, but Hamilton had seen him twice before his departure. “He believes unfalteringly that Beyond the Horizon, by Eugene G. O’Neill, is the best American play of the season and probably the best American play that has ever yet been written; and in this opinion I concur,” Hamilton wrote Garland.
Eaton wrote him that MacKaye’s Washington play “was a sad affair, all messed up with Percy’s characteristic embellishments, without coherence or simplicity or eloquence.” To Burton, writing Garland from a train from Sante Fe to Los Angeles, Washington was “a dead failure.”
Eugene O'Neill
Garland gave up, reluctantly. He called O’Neill’s play “powerful and American and significant” but wished that Beyond the Horizon “did not go quite so far in its depressing delineation of a decaying family.”
O’Neill, then just 31 years old, would, of course, delve much deeper into that subject.
Source: Pulitzer files
