A LOOK BACK: THE HEARTLAND LITERARY AWARD AT 30
Thirty years ago, the Chicago Tribune announced it would award annual prizes to honor “extraordinary writing about the people and places that make up the heart of America.” These Heartland Prizes (later Heartland Literary Awards) — one for fiction, one for nonfiction — would honor works “free from literary fads and fashions.” The first books to receive the honor were Eric Larsen’s “An American Memory” and Donald R. Katz’s “The Big Store,” a history of Sears, Roebuck & Co.
On Saturday, George Saunders and Caroline Fraser will be honored during the Chicago Humanities Festival for their books — Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo” and Fraser’s “Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” (Ron Chernow will be honored Saturday as well with a Chicago Tribune Literary Award for lifetime achievement; turn to the A&E section for more.)
In the meantime, here’s a look back at past Heartland winners.
“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien
As the Tribune put it in 1990, O’Brien’s book about Vietnam, which straddles the line between novel and memoir, “goes to the heart of the universal experience of battle and explores the way it is refracted in memory and the stories men tell to re- member and forget.” On Nov. 16, O’Brien will become the first fiction writer to receive the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.
“The Shipping News” by E. Annie Proulx
Proulx’s 1993 novel about a New York man who moves his family to the hinterlands of Newfoundland hoovered up the Heartland Prize, the National Book Award
and the Pulitzer Prize that year. As she told the Tribune upon winning the Heartland: “What I wanted to do with ‘The Shipping News’ was give an interior jolt to people, not necessarily in Newfoundland but everywhere. I was trying to do something that rattled a few hearts around.”
“Arc of Justice” by Kevin Boyle
Boyle chronicles the tragic story of Ossian Sweet, an African-American doctor tried for murder in 1925 after he and his family defended themselves against a mob at their home in an otherwise all-white Detroit neighborhood. “Boyle is a first-rate detective, a moving storyteller and a skilled analyst of race,” the Tribune stated in its 2005 award coverage. “(He) empathizes with his historical characters without falling into the too-common trap of romanticization.” It’s a gut-wrenching read.
“The Lazarus Project” by Aleksandar Hemon
Hemon was inspired by a 1908 photo of a dead body: 19-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, propped in a chair, head held by a Chicago police captain. The novel, which won in 2008, is based on this police killing, justified by calling Averbuch an anarchist. As Hemon’s protagonist investigates, he becomes obsessed and increasingly unclear about where his story ends and Averbuch’s begins.
“The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson
Wilkerson said during her 2011 Heartland Prize appearance that she interviewed more than 1,200 people to find the right three people to tell the story of the Great Migration. One of these people moved to Chicago from rural Mississippi in 1937; thus, the book explores the vital role the city played as a gateway for migrants heading north.