Columbia Hands Out the First Pulitzer Prizes

Joseph Pulitzer died in 1911 leaving Columbia University $2,000,000 to start a journalism school, and $250,000 of that money to fund annual prizes for the best American reporting, letters, and drama. On June 4, 1917, nearly six years after his death, Columbia handed out the first four. Herbert Bayard Swope of the New York World, Pulitzer's own paper, won the very first prize for reporting, for a dispatch series called "Inside the German Empire" filed from wartime Germany. The other three winners covered editorial writing, biography, and history; five categories Pulitzer's will specified, including public service and best novel, went unclaimed that year for lack of a worthy entry. A man who'd spent his career getting called a sensationalist by his rivals had arranged, from beyond the grave, to have his own trade graded on a curve he designed himself.