The most valuable prize ever awarded for a work of fiction was the $150,000 put up by Metro Goldwyn Mayer in 1948 for Ross Lockridge's epic of the American Civil War, Raintree County. The prizegiver's motive in setting up this award was venal. They wanted to spawn a blockbuster series of 'books of the film' in the manner of Gone with the Wind. The longer-term aim was to out-spectacle TV and force the pesky new medium to 'crawl back into its tube'. It all went wrong. The 1957 film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, was epic only in the scale of its box-office failure. The chronically self-destructive Clift lost his good looks in an automobile crash during production, and has two disconcertingly different faces at various points in the narrative. Lockridge was so depressed by the scorn that the prize brought him that he killed himself the same year. Film, novel and prize are all forgotten. TV won.

LRB 6 October 1994 | PDF Download