The first Pulitzer Prizes were conferred on June 4, 1917, five years after Joseph Pulitzer's endowment established the awards at Columbia University. The inaugural prizes recognized achievements in journalism, biography, and history, though the drama and fiction categories initially went unawarded for lack of a qualifying entrant. The prize has since become American letters' and journalism's most prestigious honor.
Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungarian-immigrant publisher who built a newspaper empire out of the New York World and pioneered sensational 'yellow journalism,' left $2 million to Columbia University upon his death in 1911, part of it earmarked to fund an annual prize meant to elevate the standards of American journalism and letters. He did not live to see the first ceremony.
On June 4, 1917, Columbia's advisory board handed out the inaugural Pulitzer Prizes, a far more modest affair than the star-studded ceremonies of later decades. Herbert B. Swope of the New York World won for reporting, Laura E. Richards, Maude H. Elliott, and Florence Hall shared the biography prize for their work on Julia Ward Howe, and J.J. Jusserand took the history prize. Notably, the committee found no worthy submissions in fiction or drama that year and simply declined to award prizes in those categories.
Over the following century, the Pulitzer grew into the single most coveted honor in American journalism and literature, its winners ranging from war correspondents under fire to novelists like Harper Lee and Toni Morrison. Pulitzer himself, who reportedly worried critics would see the prize as vanity, insisted the awards be judged strictly on merit by an independent board, a structure that has largely endured.
Key people: Joseph Pulitzer, Herbert B. Swope