I was surprised to find that only 38 states and Washington D.C. I credited each state with the works by authors born there (though they may or may not live there now), and eliminated recipients who were born in other countries, for obvious reasons. I counted a total of 421 prizes awarded. NB that I looked only at poetry and fiction, not because nonfiction isn’t (or can’t be) “literary,” but because it’s a huge field, and the many and varied categories proved too difficult to negotiate for this exercise. So this week, I thought I’d figure out which states have produced the most literary masterpieces-”literary masterpiece” of course being determined by the most objective possible (read: not objective at all, but what we’ve got) criteria: those who have won one or more of the country’s three most prestigious literary prizes: the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In any case, our office does, and it’s a never-ending discussion, not least because there are a hundred different metrics you could use to determine the “literariness” of a state-which is itself a made-up distinction, of course. Probably not all offices have regular arguments about which states are the most literary.
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