A new opportunity to be encouraged

A new opportunity to be encouraged Pulitzer Prize Editorials America's Best Writing 1917-2003 BY Laird B. Anderson Iowa State University Press, 336 pp. ISBN 081382544X, $34.99 paperback

Reporting, clear thinking, fluid writing, and passion. These are the courses presented at the table of American editorial writing.

As this newest anthology of Pulitzer Prize work shows so clearly, not all the winning editorials offer each of those four elements of a piece beautifully crafted. But virtually all the editorials demonstrate a degree of independent reporting, and they have passion. Some have all four ingredients.

Inevitably, some writers are more stylish than others. They exhibit a freedom granted a particular editorial writer outside the normal parameters. Others are intensely personal, as in Michael Gartners elegiac, love-filled memories of his late son Christopher, for whom a park is named in Ames, Iowa (1997 Pulitzer).

Some read as though they have elements of a news story in them, and the length stretches beyond that of an ordinary editorial. Still, there is no contesting the energy created when a writer piles up devastating facts, as Jeffrey Good, then of the Sf. Petersburg Times, did in exposing Florida's corrupt probate system (1995 Pulitzer). Or as John C. Bersias investigative work on legal loan sharks and their cronies in the Florida legislature showed in winning the prize in 2000.

Others deliver the raw impact of a hard news lead. "Lynn Milam has five metal plates in her head to remind her of the night her former boyfriend nearly beat her to death." Maria Henson of the Lexington Herald-Leader began her 1992 Pulitzer-winning editorial with that lead, which, like the subject of her series, punches the reader forcefully and requires him or her to read on.

Bernard "Buddy" Stein (1998 Pulitzer) emerges from the Riverdale section of the upper Bronx with a story of warblers on the Fieldston school campus and the importance of the scruffy trees that provide cover and protection for the birds there.

The authors, William David Sloan and Laird Anderson, have selected editorials carefully so that the reader understands that most of the Pulitzer winners demonstrate a degree of daring. Even if writing about problems endemic to government's institutions, the editorialists avoid the mundane and bureaucratic. They seek to be different.

You can't read Richard Aregood's "We Must be Crazy" (1985 Pulitzer) without coming away with the realization that Aregood speaks more plainly and clearly than 98 percent of American editorial writers. He puts the meat on the table with all the politeness of a middle linebacker.

It's fun, too, to travel back to Paul Greenberg's attempt to reason with George Corley Wallaces backers (1969 Pulitzer). "Some may find it ironic, or anyway futile, to headline an editorial addressed to Wallace people 'An Appeal to Reason,'" says Greenberg. With each word, he makes it easier to imagine Wallace, his hand on his collar, saying to a supporter at a state fair: "They call you rednecks. My neck is just as red as yours."

Read the magnificent, thunderous power of Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution (1958 Pulitzer) when he writes about the murderous cowardliness of civil-rights-era terrorists in destroying a church and a school. No editorial writer can do so without feeling a sense of pride in his craft and the courageous people who practice it.

"You do not preach and encourage hat-red for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story," McGill says. "It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe."

Students of history will find this latest compilation of Pulitzers filled with stories of dramatic events in the United States. Alongside those epic events that cry out for forceful editorials is the everyday, workmanlike persistence of good, solid writers and thinkers who somehow made it to the attention of the Pulitzer judges, who, in turn, liked what they saw.

For those of us who make a living writing opinion, the third edition of Pulitzer Prize Editorials presents a fresh opportunity to be inspired and encouraged. That's not a bad feeling while reading the book on a Sunday afternoon following a grueling Friday at the shop.

Morgan McGinley, a past NCEW president, is editorial page editor at The Day in New London, Connecticut. E-mail M.McGinley@ theday.com

Copyright MASTHEAD National Conference of Editorial Writers Winter 2003
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