Bate Gets Pulitzer For Book on Keats

Walter Jackson Bate '39, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of the Humanities, has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his biography John Keats. The prize, carrying a stipend of $500, was announced in New York yesterday.

The Pulitzer Prize for international reporting was won jointly by two American correspondents in Viet Nam--David Halberstam '55 of the New York Times and Malcolm W. Browne of the Associated Press. This marks the second year in a row that a post-war managing editor of the CRIMSON has won a Pulitzer. Last year J. Anthony Lewis '48, also of the New York Times, won the prize for national reporting. Halberstam and Browne will share a $1000 award.

Bate's book, published early last fall by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, was quickly recognized by critics and scholars as the definitive biography of Keats. It represents a twenty-five year study of Keats on Bate's part, beginning with his undergraduate thesis, Negative Capability, published in 1939. Archibald MacLeish, the last Harvard professor to win a Pulitzer Prize (for Collected Poems in 1953) commented that "more than any other English poet John Keats needs a biographer who can understand him as a man. The great importance of W.J. Bate's book is the proof it offers that that biographer has at last been found." Bate, a member of the Society of Fellows and a former Junior Fellow, was Chairman of the English Department for seven years and is now Director of Undergraduate Studies in English. He teaches English 192, "The Function and Criticism of Literature," and English 140b, "The Age of Johnson."

David Halberstam gained international prominence for his reporting of the war in Vietnam. He was the subject of feature articles in Time and Newsweek last fall and in Esquire in January. Earlier this year he won the George Polk prize and just this week was given one of the first Louis M. Lyons awards.

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