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The last time a small-press book won was nearly three decades earlier John Kennedy ToolesA Confederacy of Dunces.
The New YorkTimesheadlined itsprofileMr.
Cinderella: From Rejection Notes to the Pulitzer.Tinkershas sold 570,000 copies and counting across all formats.
I played a small, accidental role in the improbable rise ofTinkers.
I still remember reading the book in what felt like a fevered trance.
His oldest son had chronic ear infections, and Harding resorted to driving around town to calm him down.
The second he fell asleep, Id pull over and write a sentence at a time.
His only hope was that it would one day become a book.
At every stage of its life,Tinkersgave new meaning to the publishing term of art known as hand-selling.
Lise Solomon, a West Coast sales rep, read a galley and urged booksellers to take a look.
It just is a stunning experience to read it, Cotleur says now.
It gets you on all levels: emotional, visual, intellectual.
Not only wasTinkersborn in a one-room shop in a hospital; it wasnt even reviewed in theTimes.
It felt like a win for everybody along the way, says Goldman.
It also helped Bellevue Press survive.
On the day the Pulitzers were announced, Harding was teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
When he found out, he ran to his former teacher Marilynne Robinsons classroom to share the news.
Her novel,Gilead, had won the Pulitzer five years earlier.
She told me: Its the American equivalent of a knighthood.
Its your title now: Pulitzer Prizewinning author.
Its a strange kind of phenomenon thats sort of there every single day, Harding says now.
But as a writer, you cant think about it all.
You have to think about whats next.
In truth, life carries on just as it did before.
Harding had already known this, because the Pulitzer wasnt his first brush with stardom.
Music still informs Hardings life as an artist.
Theres a musicality to his prose, and a sense of intuitive expertise.
My books are smarter than I am, Harding says.
Thats one of the things I love about art: Its improvisational.
That process was already well underway on Hardings next book when he won the Pulitzer.
Harding says his second novel was seen as more polarizing than his first because it was so dark.
I dont think its as dark a book as people think it is, he says.
I think its funnier.
My job, he says, is to think about art.
Harding published areflectionthis week that sheds some light on how hes managed to stay grounded post-Pulitzer.
It was those earlyTinkersrejections followed by the faith put in him by non-conglomerates that steeled him against commercial pressures.
Rejection … freed me from thinking about publishing, he wrote.
The din of the market and publication muted, consciousness itself came into finer, deeper resolution.
Harding equates writing to working on a watch.
Im trying to make every sentence pages deep but absolutely lucid, he says.
Around the same time, the first International Eugenics Congress met in London.
Like Marilynne Robinson, Harding makes his fictional history feel both fully present and fully relevant.
The OED was particularly handy.
Unlike Robinson who says she doesnt revise Harding is slow and scholarly, a magpie of references and discoveries.
Hell go days without writing, but hes always thinking about it.
It works for him.
Youre here to make the greatest work of art you might, he says.
Its pretentious to act like you did, but to want to!
Why bother putting anything less than everything at stake?
Nine years after winning the Pulitzer, Harding still gets 100 emails a day.
I dont even like talking on the phone, he says.
I want my writing to get deeper and deeper, but denser and denser, and clearer and clearer.
