Why is that?
I mean, assuming you’re right, then I’m clearly wrong – but it seems to me that, if a mystery novel beats out everything else to win some general award, then there’s an excellent chance that it’s the best mystery novel of the year. Or if a sci-fi novel is the best novel of the year, then it’s presumably the best sci-fi novel of the year.
Why? Because literature tends to get pigeonholed, just as movies do. Horror books, sci-fi books, romance books and mysteries just tend not to be considered for general literature awards like the Pulitzers.
Well, okay, but something still has to win the general award, doesn’t it? If the best work of literature that year doesn’t happen to be a romance or a mystery or a sci-fi novel, then surely it’s a play or somebody’s autobiography or a story set out west about gunslingers riding around on horseback or – well, something in particular.
William Saroyan’s writings won him a Pulitzer Prize, an academy award, and a gold record for a number one single they didn’t have Grammies back then).
Except that most genres of literature, for some reason, aren’t considered “genres”, and don’t have awards tailored to those genres. Or rather, they mostly do have awards tailored to those genres, except that the awards pretend that they’re not, and that they’re just for “general literature”. Hence why it’s so rare for a book to win both: Because it’d have to be both in the “general literature” genre and some genre with its own award.
And Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King Jnr.
Carl Sandburg won a Pulitzer and Grammy but better than that Sidney Howard has a Pulitzer and an Oscar being the first to receive the Oscar posthumously after dying in a bizarre gardening accident.
Anyone won the Newberry Medal and the Pulitzer? Or the Nobel Prize for Literature?
Isaac Bashevis Singer received Newberry Honors three times in the 1960’s, but never got their top Medal. He had to take solace in the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature.