Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

[2] The name was changed to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948, and eligibility was expanded to also include short stories, novellas, novelettes, and poetry, as well as novels.

A new consideration arose when the Pulitzer jury was unanimous in recommending Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey for the 1928 prize, although the book deals with Peruvians in Peru, not with Americans in America.

Robert Morss Lovett disagreed, saying it would be "mere subterfuge to say that it has anything to do with the highest standard of American manners and manhood," but went along with the jury in finding "less literary merit" in the other novels under discussion.

(Lovett rejected the runner-up Black April by Julia Peterkin, calling it "a rather unedifying picture of life in a primitive negro community" and "an ironical answer to the terms on which the prize is offered."

[4] Further refinement into "the best novel published that year by an American author" removed any impediment to Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth in 1932, also with a foreign setting in its study of Chinese village life in Anhui, East China.