Willa Cather Pulitzer Prize Winner One of Ours Life and Letters of Walter H. Page Alice Adams A Daughter of the Middle Border Anna Christie Miss Lulu Bett Age of Innocence Americanization of Edward Bok Education

The most important novel of 1917, as voted by the jury selecting titles for The National Arts Club Exhibit, was His Family by Ernest Poole - a moving portrait of a New York family. In 1918, Carl Sandburg's collection of 103 poems, Cornhuskers, earned a Pulitzer Prize Special Letters Award. That same year, The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams was published, wherein the young man is advised that the role of a teacher is merely to provide students mastery of their tools, as the true object of education is the economy of one's own force, clearing away obstacles and direct application of effort. Once acquired, these tools and models may be cast aside, for the human figure is but a geometric form used to study relationships, possessing an air of reality that must be treated as though it had life.

The Americanization of Edward Bok, the 1921 Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography of a Dutch boy fifty years after his emigration, provides insight into the assimilation experience. That same year, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence captured the social mores of New York City's upper class in the 1870s, where reputation and appearance superseded occupation or ability, centering on lawyer Newland Archer's reconsideration of his socially safe marriage plans upon the arrival of his fiancée's exotic cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska. Zona Gale's 1920 novel Miss Lulu Bett, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921, tells the story of a household drudge whose life is transformed by an unusual romance.

Hamlin Garland's 1921 work A Daughter of the Middle Border, which won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, continues the author's intimate social history of Midland America begun in A Son of the Middle Border, weaving his own cosmopolitan experiences into an autobiographical record with the flavor of a novel. Also in 1921, Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams portrayed a family's struggles to keep up with the wealthy in their town. The following year, Willa Cather's One of Ours presented a portrait of a peculiarly American personality - a young man born after the frontier had vanished, whose quintessentially American restlessness seeks redemption on a frontier far bloodier and more distant than that which his forefathers had tamed.

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