Black Horse Oliver

Surprise shivered the book world last week, when the winner of the annual $1,000 (plus publicity) Pulitzer Prize for the best novel of 1928 was unofficially revealed to be a novel called Victim and Victor, by a man named John Rathbone Oliver. Wise literary prophets had been forecasting winners and raising authorial hopes, but none had mentioned Victim and Victor. It was a literary dark horse blacker than night.

The sudden rise to publicity of Victim and Victor caught the book trade unaware. Clerks went scurrying around looking under counters to see if they had any in stock. The novel was published last December by the Religious Book Department of Macmillan Co. It was reviewed in due course. Here and there a big-time reviewer was favorable but there was no concerted beating of the tomtoms such as heralds a volume bound for success of esteem and money.

The Pulitzer awards are not officially announced until May. Dr. Richard Burton, chairman of the prize jury, let slip the news about Author Oliver's book in a lecture on "Types of Contemporary Literature" at the University of Minnesota. Upton Sinclair's Boston would have been a winner, he said, but for its "socialistic tendencies."

Without tumult and tomtoms, Author Oliver has had literary success before now. His novel Fear, published two years ago. also by Macmillan's Religious Book Department, has achieved eleven printings. Victim and Victor has had one large printing since December. Both are on the same general theme: the healing power, spiritual, mental, physical, that may lie in the co-operative work of an understanding physician and an intelligent minister. The hero of Victim and Victor is a priest unfrocked for drunkenness. Author Oliver, a Doctor, was an unfrocked minister from 1923 to 1927, is now practising psychiatry and criminology in Baltimore.

An Oliver autobiography. Foursquare, will be published next autumn by Macmillan. Other books of his include: The Good Shepherd, The Six Pointed Cross in the Dust.