• Just finished: The Black Count by Tom Reiss (2013 prize for biography)

• Now reading: All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1947 prize for fiction)

I.

Over at The Big Read, we’ve been reading Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo all summer, which made Tom Reiss’s The Black Count — a biography of Dumas’s father — an easy pick for the next book in my Pulitzer Project.

Monte Cristo has its moments of greatness, but overall I was honestly a little bit let down. I found the story slow at times, over-plotted, and too long by 500-600 pages.

After reading The Black Count, though, I have a richer and far more appreciative understanding of the son’s famous novel. That’s not to say I necessarily like the story any better, but I get it on a deeper level — which makes a world of difference. Tom Reiss’s superb book was a potent reminder of the power of backstory.

II.

Alexandre Dumas’s father, also named Alex, died when the son was just four years old. Alex, born in what is now Haiti to a white man and a slave, was a general during the French Revolution of the late 18th century. It was a remarkable period of time for the nation, in which slavery was abolished and racial equality was on the horizon.

At one point, though, Alex’s story came to mirror what would later be found in the son’s famous novel. As Tom Reiss writes:

“By the wiles of conspiracy, [Alex Dumas] found himself imprisoned in a fortress and poisoned by unknown enemies, without hope of appeal and forgotten by the world. It was no accident that his fate sounds like that of a young sailor named Edmond Dantes, about to embark on a promising career and marry the woman he loves, who finds himself a pawn in a plot he never imagined, locked away without witnesses or trial in the dungeon of an island fortress called the Château d'If. But unlike the hero of his son's novel The Count of Monte Cristo, Alex Dumas met no benefactor in the dungeon to lead him to escape or to a hidden treasure. He never learned the reason for his trials, for his abrupt descent from glory to suffering.”

Alex suffered a number of ailments and was never the same after his two years in prison. He fathered another child upon returning home — Alexandre — but was soon diagnosed with stomach cancer. In spite of that, Reiss writes: 

“Alex Dumas would spend the last four years of his life inseparably attached to little Alexandre.” 

After Alex died, the family suffered further indignities by being denied the pension they were owed, plunging them into poverty for the entirety of Alexandre’s childhood. 

Reiss notes:

“General Dumas’s son would spend years mulling over his father’s predicament in the Taranto fortress — to be imprisoned indefinitely, for unknown crimes, by men he never met — and reimagining his continual dead-end dialogues with his jailer.” 

The seeds of Edmond Dantes are obvious. Whereas Alex Dumas’s untimely death meant he could never get revenge on the men who wronged him, the son’s creation — the Count of Monte Cristo — would be unmatched in dispensing justice. 

Writing an all-time classic was Alexandre Dumas’s revenge on behalf of his father. As Reiss wrote, in regards to Dumas’s mindset, “The greatest sin of all . . . was that his father, General Alex Dumas, was forgotten.” With The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas made sure his father wouldn’t be forgotten, even if disguised in the figure of Edmond Dantes.

Just having that much backstory adds some depth to the novel, doesn’t it? If you imagine Edmond as a superhero version of Dumas’s father, Edmond’s actions make much more sense. Another layer has been added to my understanding of the story and I’m not as annoyed with Dumas as I was before.

III.

It’s almost always the case that when I’ve taken time to get to know the backstory of a book, I appreciate it all the more. Many of my initial harsh judgments become inevitably softened by knowing some of the how and why.

This idea can, of course, be applied much more broadly.

IV.

Beyond the reminder of how important a backstory can be, there was a really interesting lesson in societal progress. For about a decade in the late 1700s, France was more progressive and racially diverse than almost any other nation on earth. Then Napoleon grabbed power and subsequently rolled back those freedoms. There are other moments in history that have taught us this lesson as well — America’s Reconstruction period after the Civil War, for instance — but it’s worth hearing again and again that progress, once achieved, must be fought for on a regular basis.

I really enjoyed The Black Count overall. Even just a handful of days later, it’s feeling rather sticky in my memory. I highly recommend this unique story that combines military history, literary backstory, and cultural treatise on racial equality.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate your time and inbox space.

-Jeremy

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I.

At 1,163 pages, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker — winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Biography — is about as long as printed books get. Not only that, the pages are big and dense with words. Ask anyone who’s read the book, though, and they’ll tell you it’s among the greatest non-fiction works of all-time. One friend said:

“In my opinion, it is the best book ever written about American politics.”

Another friend noted:

“Longest book I’ve read, maybe the best piece of nonfiction.”

It’s worth pointing out that both of these friends are journalists, which was Robert Caro’s line of work before turning his career to door-stopping biographies.

I have to agree with them. The Power Broker sits atop any list of great American histories or biographies.

What is it about this massive book about a New York City parks commissioner that desverses such adulation?

As with any all-time great work, it’s because the subject matter goes beyond its immediate topic and gets to the core of human nature. It tells us something uniquely insightful about life.

In this particular story, Caro deeply examined a man who accomplished truly great things in the realm of public works, but used abhorrent means to get there.

Ultimately, this is a book about means and ends.

Robert Moses created more highways, built more bridges, and established more parks than most other great public works officials combined. In his wake, however, were tens of thousands of relocated people (mostly Black and Brown people), unnecessarily condemned homes and apartment buildings, and a city transformed into a concrete jungle.

His primary motivation — Caro would say his only motivation —was raw power. To Moses, people were only good for their usefulness to his ends.

II.

I started reading The Power Broker well before deciding to embark on this Pulitzer Project. Earlier this year, I got a coworker (Seth) hooked on Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon Johnson. Seth read those four books with a few of his friends and enjoyed the experience so much that he wanted to do it again.

Enter The Power Broker, the famed biographer’s first published book. Since I hadn’t read it before, I was invited to be part of the Caro reading group this time.

We all started on August 1st. There was a rough schedule in mind, but no daily page count or anything. We used a text thread to send updates about our progress, note the passages and stories that stood out, and generally shoot the shit about the amazing quality of Caro’s writing. Since it’s non-fiction, we weren’t worried about spoilers or anything — the book’s value lies far more in the telling than the facts.

During the workday, Seth and I would chat even more about the reading via Slack and in our weekly team calls. (We make up a team of two within the marketing department.) We’d talk about connections to work, but also to other parts of our lives.

Though the seeds of a real friendship had been planted quite a bit earlier, it’s in this period of time, I think, that Seth and I made the lasting transition into friendship. No matter what happens at work, we are more than just coworkers.

And it’s all thanks to a book.

III.

The ends of this reading experience — finishing the book, being someone who has read The Power Broker, making progress on my Pulitzer Project — are great. Absolutely worthwhile and totally satisfying. The means, though, were even more fulfilling. When a book fosters connection and good conversation, its meaning is brought outside the covers and into the real world. We can’t just live inside our books, after all. (No matter how appealing that idea might be.)

In my final reflection of The Power Broker, here’s what is crystal clear: how you treat and interact with people along the way — how you listen, love, help, etc. — determines the ultimate value and success of whichever ends you’re after in life.

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Thanks so much for reading. I deeply appreciate your time and inbox space.

-Jeremy

Early last week, I finished listening to Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America and entered it into my spreadsheet as the first finished title of this project.1

Eliza Griswold’s 2018 book, which won the prize for General Non-Fiction, is an eye-opening account of fracking’s effects on two small Pennsylvania towns called Amity and Prosperity.

The story was necessary and timely, the reporting was balanced, and Griswold broke through Trump-land stereotypes to give us a firsthand look at what happens when the energy extraction industry comes to town. It was an excellent and worthwhile listening experience.

Part of what struck me about that experience, though, was that I didn’t love consuming it in audio format. Though I’ve unabashedly become hooked on audiobooks in the last year, there’s inevitably something missing in the audio-only experience.

I can’t linger over lines or paragraphs that stand out, let alone underline them or add marginalia (which I love to do); I miss catching dedications, acknowledgments, and even end notes (these are included in some audiobooks, but not most); visual elements like maps, photos, illustrations, and even text formatting make for unique delights that quite obviously don’t translate off the paper (ebooks don’t do visual elements well, either); my mindset is even different while listening to a book — I’m far more in a mode of consumption than of appreciation for a well-written narrative work of art.

I enjoy audiobooks. I count them as reading and as “books read.” But they just aren’t the same. The same is true for ebooks.

Books, in their truest form, are printed on paper and bound between two covers.

As I was researching Pulitzer submission guidelines this week (I fully understand how ridiculous that sounds), I discovered that the Pulitzer board feels the same way:

All entries must be made available for purchase by the general public in either hardcover or bound paperback book form.

It bears repeating: I love audiobooks and I appreciate the convenience of ebooks — I take advantage of both formats frequently — but I’m also a firm believer that part of the charm of books is in their tangible form and multisensory experience: the cover art, the way you can dawdle and flip back and forth as desired, the gratification of turning physical pages as proof of your progress. (Finishing an ebook always feels so anti-climactic. “Whelp, you’re done! Move along!”)

Finally, there’s something to be said for giving your attention to a screenless object. I’ve made my career on the internet for nearly as long as I’ve been working. My workdays are irrevocably tethered to a screen. But, as we all know and observe, screenification goes beyond our jobs: our grocery shopping is done on a screen, chats with family happen via a screen, plenty of our family game time is spent with a Nintendo Switch. I could go on and on and on. None of this is inherently bad — in fact, those things I listed are convenient and fun. It just means that any non-screen time becomes set apart and almost sacred.

I’d love to create more of that kind of time in my life and this project might just be the perfect way to bring it about.

For my Pulitzer reading, which holds greater significance than my other reading, I’m going to stick to the transcendent magic of paper.

-Jeremy

Between 2017 and 2021, I read a biography of every American president. It was a project that spanned 60+ door-stopping books (I read multiple volumes for a number of presidents), totaling tens of thousands of pages and hours upon hours upon hours of reading.

Since then, my reading has been quite meandering. I’ve wandered through library shelves, used bookstore shelves, my own shelves. I’ve thought about diving deeply into genres like sci-fi/fantasy or historical fiction, but I know I’d eventually get bored. I’m a reader who really enjoys variety in genres and subjects.

For a long time, I’ve had a prize list at the top of my mind. Book awards lists aren’t perfect, but they’re always interesting. Every winning title has been chosen for a reason and has something unique to say about society at that moment.

The Pulitzer Prize quickly emerged as the gnarliest, most ambitious option. Across fiction and non-fiction, the Pulitzer has been the most esteemed and well-known prize in publishing for over a century.

Since 1917, Pulitzers have been awarded “for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States.” There are five sub-categories of books that I’m interested in:

• Fiction

• History

• Biography

• General non-fiction

• Memoir or Autobiography — created just this year (previously, this genre had been part of the biography category)

(There are awards for poetry and drama, but I’ve never been one to read in those genres. Perhaps someday.)

I was understandably reluctant to accept this self-imposed challenge. Plenty of folks have embarked on a quest to read all of the winning novels — a list of 97 titles — but as far as I can tell online, nobody in the internet era has attempted to read all of the fiction and non-fiction titles (and document it).

I couldn’t resist.

As I tend to do, I made a spreadsheet. After a bit of tallying, I counted up 377 titles to read, and even that number ends up being a little short because a number of prizes have been awarded to a series. I’ve read 29 of those titles already, less than 10% of the goal. I’ll likely re-read some of those, but not all.

There are well-known classics (To Kill A Mockingbird) and totally unknown histories (1947’s Across the Wide Missouri). Regardless of what I think of each book or story, I know I’ll learn something worthwhile about America, about humanity, and hopefully about myself.

I don’t have a timeframe in mind — more than a handful of years, most likely — nor do I intend on going in any kind of order. Knowing myself, the only way to actually accomplish this goal is to allow my whims to take me between decades and genres at random. It definitely won’t be all of my reading, either; as when I was reading POTUS biographies, I need room in my life for murder mysteries, book club reads, and new books that catch my eye.

Wish me luck and keep an eye on my updates in the newsletter. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll provide some background on the prize, interesting stories (like years where no prize was awarded), why there are four non-fiction categories, the biggest snubs, and more.

Currently, I’m about one-third through Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (1975, biography) and I’m listening to Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity (2019, general non-fiction). I don’t know what’s on deck after that, but I know I’ll find something interesting.

As always, thanks so much for the time and inbox space. I deeply appreciate your following along with my bookish obsessiveness.

-Jeremy

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