Word: puritanically
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...PURITAN VILLAGE by Sumner Chilton Powell. 215 pages. Wesleyan...
...award of the Pulitzer Prize for history this month startled many historians and most publishers simply because the winning book and its author were almost unknown. In fact, Sumner Chilton Powell's Puritan Village had almost gone unpublished: scholarly presses, including Harvard, had turned it down as "too specialized" before it was accepted by Wesleyan in Connecticut. With its $15 price tag, many bookstores had not bothered to stock it; hardly more than 1,000 copies had been sold; immediately after the Pulitzer announcement the book was almost unobtainable...
...Traditions. The book that beat out such possibilities as Oscar Handlin's panoramic The Americans or William and Bruce Cation's Two Roads to Sumter is a meticulous and remarkably detailed account of the early government and social organization of the town of Sudbury, Mass., founded by Puritan settlers in 1638. Generations of orators have sweepingly proclaimed the early towns of New England "a unique experiment in self-government," while many historians have tacitly assumed that the early settlers brought with them a broadly homogeneous body of English law and administrative methods. Historian Powell's achievement...
Under those headings, the jurors sent not a single nomination to the University of Columbia board of trustees, which picks the winners. Some of the other arts-and-letters awards, though, testified to a painstaking search for merit. The history award went to Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town, a book that was rejected by two publishers before Author Sumner Chilton Powell found a printer. Powell fielded his prize with special gratitude. He hoped, he said, that it might help him on his newest project: finding a suitable...
Other awards were as follows: General Non-fiction--Richard Hofstadter, professor of American History at Columbia, for Anti-Intellectualism in America. History--Sumner Chilton Powell for Puritan Village. Poetry--Louis Simpson for At the End of the Open Road. Merriman Smith, White House correspondent for United Press International, received the prize for national reporting for his coverage last November 22 of the assassination of President Kennedy. No prizes were given, for fiction, music, or drama this year