Winning major prizes can have a chilling effect on unprepared authors who worry that their next book might not measure up. When Alan Taylor '77 won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes in 1996 for his book William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, he was stunned. "I didn't even know I was a finalist, much less that I could be a winner," he said.
Though he almost saw the initial press attention spin out of control, the University of California at Davis professor of history recovered and has suffered no writer's cramp in the aftermath of the prizes. Moreover, the acclaim brought some prestigious opportunities, which he has fielded nimbly--as lead-off author in an important book series, as a contributor to a top national magazine and as the recipient of what may be the most enviable job offer in all of academe.
The Pulitzer Prizes are announced with no notice to the winners. In newsrooms, where most Pulitzers are directed, announcements produce cheers, toasts and hugs. At UC-Davis, where Taylor has taught since 1994, his 1996 Pulitzer produced confusion.
He had just returned from a tennis match ("my opponent had trounced me pretty thoroughly," he said) when his office phone started ringing. "I was sitting there, tired and sweaty, and I had no idea what I was supposed to say." Things didn't get any better. "As soon as I put the phone down it would ring again. They wanted to send photographers, and soon they were in my office, too."
Finally, he persuaded the paparazzi to let him go home, change and return for photos and a news conference--his first and, so far, his only. The story ran on the front page of the Sacramento Bee, and for a time he was a local celebrity. A colleague recounts that there was even a pizza delivery boy who, when Taylor opened the door to his condo, said, "Hey, aren't you the Pulitzer guy?"
When one sits in Taylor's cramped office--standard issue for the UC-Davis history department--it's easy to imagine that scene. Tall metal shelves filled with books take up most of three walls, and the fourth wall also would be filled with books, except that they'd cover a window. A bicycle--the campus is built around bike paths and Taylor doesn't own a car--consumes much of the remaining space. Though professors joke that their 1993 concrete building is "1970s Stalinist" in style, the architecture doesn't dampen the camaraderie inside.
UC-Davis might seem an odd place for a native Mainer and a historian of the early republic. Once an agricultural school amid California's vast and fertile Central Valley, Davis is now the third largest campus in the UC system, with 25,000 students, a growing history department and a chance to eclipse the more geographically constrained Berkeley and UCLA in enrollments.
Walking through the downtown next to the campus on an 80-degree late October day, Taylor said, "My friends from Maine all think I must hate it here." He doesn't, though. Northern California, he said, "appeals to my outdoors side."
Taylor has no plans to pull up academic stakes, though winning the big history prizes while just into his 40s has opened doors for him.
He received an invitation from The New Republic to become a contributor, and his quarterly essays in the journal cover an extensive range of subjects, among them George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and DeWitt Clinton, the powerful New York governor who never quite became president.
The prizes also brought him to the notice of Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University (and the son of the late Jack Foner, who taught history to Taylor at Colby). Foner, who served on the 1996 Bancroft prize committee, was planning an ambitious new series--The Penguin History of the United States--and he wanted Taylor to write the first volume, American Colonies. Taylor pointed out that his field was the early republic, not colonial history, and Foner said he was welcome to write that volume instead. After thinking it over, though, Taylor decided that rather than sticking to what he knew best he would take on the new challenge. "I already taught the Colonial America course, and decided this would be a great way to go deeper into the period," he said. Though all five parts of The Penguin History series were assigned at once, American Colonies was first to appear, in November 2001, and Publisher's Weekly predicted: "This bold new view of early America should be widely and well reviewed, and will attract a broad range of students of American history."
Finally the prizes led--indirectly--to the offer of a coveted faculty chair at Harvard, seemingly the pinnacle of a New England historian's profession. In 1997 one of Taylor's mentors, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (who had won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft in 1991 for A Midwife's Tale) asked him to participate on a search committee to rebuild Harvard's history department after it had been depleted by retirements, and he agreed. As sometimes happens, the rest of the search committee turned its attention to Taylor as a possible candidate, and reluctantly he consented. "It was an absurd situation, really," he said. "I told them there was almost no chance of my accepting." Yet the offer, when it came, was tempting. "You expect Harvard to be, well, snobbish, and it wasn't like that at all," he said. "They were warm and welcoming."
Ultimately, though, he turned down Harvard. He was deeply involved in a similar rebuilding process at Davis and felt, according to Ulrich, "as if he'd be leaving them in the lurch." He also was concerned about his partner, Emily Albu, who had just gained a tenured position in classics at Davis after years of searching.
"I figured he was gone," said Charles Walker, an ebullient older colleague of Taylor's at UC-Davis. The two men, who bow and call each other "doctor," had bet on it, in fact. "I lost a hundred dollars on him," Walker said. "I went down to the ATM and got five crisp twenties. He was disappointed. I think he was expecting a hundred-dollar bill, so he could frame it."
