Scholar to Speak for Pulitzer Prize Celebration Event
JONESBORO – One hundred years of the Pulitzer Prize will be celebrated on the Arkansas State University campus at 6 p.m. on Thursday, June 23, with the program “For Whom the Pulitzer Tolls: The One that Got Away,” a presentation on the Ernest Hemingway novel once considered too offensive to receive the prize.
Dr. Alex Vernon, an internationally recognized Hemingway scholar and professor of English at Hendrix College in Conway, will discuss Hemingway’s "For Whom the Bell Tolls," recommended by the Pulitzer fiction jury, with initial concurrence by the Pulitzer Board, to receive the 1941 Pulitzer Prize. The recommendation was reversed, however, after the board was convinced that the novel was indecent. No award was given that year.
Hemingway, who wrote portions of earlier works in a Piggott, Arkansas, barn-studio during visits with his second wife's family, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for "The Old Man and the Sea."
The Pulitzer celebration is sponsored by the Arkansas Humanities Council and hosted by the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center, an Arkansas State University Heritage Site. The event will be held in the Spring River Room of the Student Union on the A-State campus (GPS 101 N. Caraway Road).
The community is invited and encouraged to attend. For more details, one may contact the Arkansas Humanities Council at (501) 320-5761.
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