PULITZER PLUMS

The world at large has a great love for annual tabulations and prognostications of every kind and the results of the Pulitzer Prize awards are as eagerly awaited as the daily batting average of the baseball star. Like all rigid classifications these awards are liable to error, but in their choice of men and women to receive the distinction the committee has made a representative selection which should prove generally satisfactory to a critical public.

Of particular interest to the University are the awards for the best biography to Henry James and for the best volume of verse to Robert Frost. Both men are Harvard graduates and are linked with the New England tradition on which the college was built. Henry James, whose father, William James with Royce and Santayana formed Harvard's great trio of philosophic thinkers, is especially close to the University even if it were not for the subject of his biography, the life of Charles W. Eliot. That Mr. James should have received the prize is a tribute both to himself and to the man of whom he wrote.

Of interest for another reason is the decision of the committee to give the historical prize to Bernadotte E. Schmidt for his book The Coming of the World War. Although a professor at the University of Chicago, Professor Schmidt and Professor Fay, of this University, collaborated in starting a history of the events leading up to the War but they separated and Professor Fay published his volume, The Origins of the World War two years ago. The two works are similar in many ways but they differ on the fundamental question as to where to lay the blame for the final cause of the outbreak of 1914. Professor Schmidt puts the onus on Germany whereas she is exonerated by Professor Fay.