Harpers Cleans Up at Magazine Awards

Harper’s was the champion among magazines Wednesday as it took three National Magazine Awards--for essays and criticism, feature writing and fiction published in 1993.

At the New York presentation of the most prestigious editorial honors in the magazine industry, Harper’s was honored for essays written by Lucy Grealy, Louise Erdrich and David Beers, for Darcy Frey’s feature portrait of six aspiring basketball players in Brooklyn, and for short stories by Allan Gurganus, Tony Earley and George Saunders.

Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham told the crowd: “I’m having a very lucky day.”

In a field of many multiple nominees, the only other magazine to win more than one award was Health--for general excellence among publications with circulations of 400,000 to 1 million and for a single-topic issue, its look at caring for elderly parents.

The New Yorker won for reporting (Lawrence Wright’s two-part story about a case of “recovered memory” and Allure won for design.

The 28th annual awards, sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors and administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, also went to Business Week, Wired, Print, Fortune and Philadelphia.

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Roth Wins PEN / Faulkner: Philip Roth’s “Operation Shylock” has won the novelist the 1994 PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN / Faulkner Foundation announced Wednesday in Washington. The coveted literary honor comes with a $15,000 payment.

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No Points for Slurs: Words expressing racial and ethnic slurs will no longer earn points in Scrabble when a new edition of the official game dictionary is published later this year.

Milton Bradley Co., maker of the popular board game, is bowing to concerns about words in “The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary” and has agreed to delete them from the new edition to be published by Merriam-Webster Inc.

A total of 50 words considered offensive on racial, ethnic or sexual grounds will be cut, according to John D. Williams Jr., executive director of the National Scrabble Assn., which works with Milton Bradley and Merriam-Webster to compile the dictionary.

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The Pulitzer That Got Away: When the Pulitzer Prizes were announced last week, honoring achievement in journalism and the arts, three authors had to share a special award in the category of humiliation.

They wrote the three books judged by a panel of historians to be finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in history, but the august Pulitzer board decided not to award a history prize after all.

Seymour Topping, a former New York Times managing editor who administers the Pulitzers, said this week that there were “fine aspects” to all three submissions, “but none of the three met the criteria of the board.”

As a result, Lawrence M. Friedman’s “Crime and Punishment in American History,” Joel Williamson’s “William Faulkner and Southern History” and Gerald Posner’s widely discussed “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of J.F.K.” were identified as three good books that were not prize worthy.

Naturally, the turndown perplexed and rankled a lot of people. “I think it was an insult to the three contenders,” said Pauline Maier, a history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was one of the three history judges. “It was as if the board was saying to them, ‘Your book is not up to a certain level.’ ”

At a meeting last week in Atlanta of the Organization of American Historians, members came up to Steve Fraser, the Basic Books editor of “Crime and Punishment in American History,” to commiserate and share their surprise.

“It’s such a real slap in the face to the whole history profession,” Fraser said. “Why do you assemble three distinguished historians and ask for their judgment if you don’t intend to take their suggestions seriously?”

The three history finalists will have to content themselves with what might have been. This may be doubly frustrating for Basic Books; Maier revealed the history judges believed “Crime and Punishment in American History” was the best of the three titles.

According to Fraser, the book has sold 10,000 to 11,000 copies since publication in September. “That’s a good sale, especially considering that the book costs $30,” he said. “However, a Pulitzer would certainly have increased sales considerably.”