Kingsley Takes Pulitzer Award; ‘men in White’ Outstanding

Last night Sidney Kingsley (nee Kirschner twenty-eight years ago) was in Moscow, where he had gone a month ago to spend a well-earned six-weeks’ vacation and to study the Soviet theatre.

Last night, the odds are roughly a thousand to one, Kingsley would have preferred to be at the Columbia University Faculty Club where Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia, was making formal announcement of the annual Pulitzer prize awards. For last night, at the annual Columbia School of Journalism dinner, he would have received what he might well have considered the third greatest thrill of his young life.

His greatest thrill, he will probably tell interviewers when he returns from Soviet Russia, was on the night of September 26, 1933, when his play “Men in White” opened at the Broadhurst Theatre. The experience second to that in spine-tingling potence occurred the following morning when Kingsley opened the newspapers and found that practically every dramatic critic in New York had stamped his play with the magic word “success.”

GETS THE THOUSAND

And last night the triumph of this young Jewish lad, who less than a year ago was unknown to fame, was made dramatically complete. He was awarded a prize of $1,000 as the author of “Men in White,” the amazingly successful inspirational play about a hospital-full of doctors, which the advisory board of the School of Journalism, overruling the selection of its play jury, had deemed best answered Joseph Pulitzer’s requirements of “the original American play, performed in New York, which shall best represent the educational value and power of the stage.”

Although formal announcement of the award was made last night, the fact that Kingsley’s play had been designated was known early last week when a newspaperman divulged the information in his column. At the same time it was learned that the Advisory Board of the School of Journalism had overruled the selection of its jury. The jury had picked for the award “Mary of Scotland,” by Maxwell Anderson, winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize.

Aside from two School of Journalism seniors who were named as alternates for the $1,500 traveling scholarship awards made annually to the three ranking students of the graduating class, Kingsley was the only known Jew to receive one of the fifteen Pulitzer prizes this year. The two alternates named are Mark J. Ginsbourg, a resident of Shanghai, China, and Jerome I. Myerberg, of Newton, Mass.

FEW JEWISH PLAYWRIGHTS WIN AWARD

Only three other Jewish play-wrights have been honored by Pulitzer play awards since they were started in 1918. Two of them, George S. Kaufman and Ira Gershwin, were co-authors of the musical comedy “Of Thee I Sing” which won the prize in 1932 and set a precedent as the first musical comedy to be thus honored. The third was Elmer Rice, whose “Street Scene” won in 1931.

Kingsley, whose father is a practising dentist in the Bronx, started the play exactly three years before it was produced. He says he wrote it in three months and took three years to rewrite it. The youthful playwright is a 1928 graduate of Cornell, which he attended on a free tuition scholarship. He accounts himself a New Yorker both at heart and by actual birth.

After graduation Kingsley joined a stock company in Westchester where he rated twelve dollars a week for four months of small bits. When the company evaporated into the thick gloom that hung over 1929, Kingsley went from one job to another. He read plays, wrote short stories for theatre programs, wrote and rewrote his own plays, went to Hollywood to write scenarios and then returned to start work in earnest on “Men in White,” which after wandering from one producer to another (several having bought it but failing to produce it) had finally landed with its ultimate producers, the Group Theatre in cooperation with two independent producers, James Ullman and Sidney Harmon.

PLAY IS MONEY-MAKER

The $1,000 prize that Kingsley will receive when he returns from Russia is only small change compared to the sums he has realized from royalties, sale of book and film rights. He is reported to have received $46,000 for the film rights and his share of the play’s royalties are expected to total $100,000 before the final curtain is rung down on “Men in White,” Covici, Friede, Inc., are the publishers of the play. As a book it has gone into its fourth edition.

Notable among other Pulitzer prize winners is Frederick T. Birchall, European correspondent for the New York Times. His accounts of events on the Nazi front won for him the $500 award for distinguished service as a foreign or Washington correspondent during the year.

Other prize winners were, in journalism: Medford (Oregon) Mail Tribune, a $500 gold medal. E. P. Chase, $500 for editorial “Where is Our Money,” published in the Atlantic (Iowa) Telegraph. For best example of reporter’s work, $1,000 awarded to Royce Brier of the San Francisco Chronicle, for his account of the lynching of the kidnapers John M. Holmes and Thomas H. Thurmond.

For the best cartoon, $500 to Edmund Duffy of Baltimore Sun. For the best novel, $1,000 to Caroline Miller, for “Lamb in His Bosom,” published by Harper and Brothers. For the best history of the United States, $2,000 to Herbert Agar, for “The People’s Choice,” published by Houghton-Mifflin Co. of Boston. Award of $1,000 for the best biography went to Tyler Dennett, published by Dodd, Mead and Co. Robert Hillyer was awarded $1,000 for best volume of verse, “Collected Verse,” published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Traveling scholarships of $1,500 value each were awarded to Fred Gruin, Harold A. Bezazian and Betty Turner, graduates of the Columbia School of Journalism. A music scholarship with value of $1,500 was awarded to Percival Price of Ottawa, Canada. Cathal O’Toole of Long Island City won the $1,500 art student scholarship.