Hopwood Awards Lead in Their Field
Interest Revenue from Quarter Million Dollar Bequest of Alumnus
Used to Encourage Promising Writers
By Howard Mumford Jones
Professor of English
There was graduated with the class of 1905 a young man by the name of Avery Hopwood, who had been born in Cleveland in 1884, the son of James and Jule Pendergast Hopwood. Almost immediately after his return home, he was made the special New York correspondent for the Cleveland Leader, and thereafter his life was to be spent mainly in New York City.
It was not alone the city; it was the theater that held him there. With Channing Pollock he had written a play of serious import, called "Clothes," the first of a long line of plays, the great majority of them successful, which Hopwood was to write either alone or in collaboration.
At one time he had four plays running simultaneously on Broadway. With Mary Roberts Rinehart he was the author of the enormously successful mystery play, "The Bat." Most of his plays were written for entertainment only, but as "Clothes" indicated, and as some few of the fifty plays also indicate, there was hidden beneath the farceur and the man about town a stifled desire to be more than a theatrical entertainer.
Mr. Hopwood never married, the Lambs Club, the Coffee House, and the University of Michigan Club of New York being sufficient outlet for his social energies when he was not writing. He travelled a good deal, and it was while he was spending a summer in Juan les Pins on the Riviera that, swimming after dinner and in the dark, he became separated from his friends and drowned.
He was at the time of his death forty-four years old; he had written over half a hundred plays in twenty-two years. His name had become associated with the bedroom farce, and some of his comedies were supposed to be shocking. Whether they would shock now-a-days is at least a debatable question; more important is it to note that the pressure of the theater upon Hopwood was well nigh irresistible; he was, by the very conditions of his life, forced to give the public what it wanted—or what theatrical managers insisted the public wanted. Some of these titles Mr. Hopwood did not include in the list of plays published in Who's Who in America, but among his productions there are other comedies, like "Fair and Warmer" which, if they do not aspire to the level of great drama, are sound and amusing theatrical entertainment.
At the time of his death Mr. Hopwood's estate, valued at a million dollars, went to the support of his mother, but upon her death, which followed shortly, one-fifth of it came as a bequest to the University of Michigan. Under the terms of Mr. Hopwood's will the Regents of the University are empowered "To invest and keep the same invested and to use the in-By come there from in perpetuity, as prizes to be known as 'The Avery Hopwood and Jule Hopwood Prizes,' to be awarded annually to students in the Department of Rhetoric of the University of Michigan who perform the best creative work in the fields of dramatic writing, fiction, poetry, and the essay. The number and value of the prizes shall be in the discretion of the Faculty or other governing body of the University, but the income shall be distributed annually or semi-annually, and shall not be allowed to accumulate from year to year. In this connection, it is especially desired that the students competing for the prizes shall not be confined to academic subjects, but shall be allowed the widest possible latitude, and that the new, the unusual, and the radical shall be especially encouraged."
Feeling perhaps that the conditions of the American Theater had not allowed him to achieve the new, the unusual, and the radical, Mr. Hopwood, it would seem, wished to fulfill in the achievements of others his own unfulfilled ambition.
The size of the bequest, and the provision that the income shall be spent each year, create the largest amount of money spent in awards for creative writing in any American university, and probably in any university of the world. The first contest was held, without much publicity, in 1930-31, the faculty committee in charge being desirous to move cautiously in the expenditure of the prizes. Five major awards of $2500 were set up, and eight minor awards of $250 each, but as no one seemed quite worthy of $2500, and as a number of writers of promise appeared, the major awards were divided among ten students—eight women and two men. The minor awards, which are given to manuscripts as such, and not to individuals, were given to seven different students, one writer achieving two citations.
This year the contests are continuing, although but four major awards are announced. In addition, a special Freshman contest, with prizes totaling $300, was instituted in the first semester, prizes going to nine different manuscripts submitted by eight writers. The object of the Freshman awards is to bring the contests as a whole to the attention of entering students, and to encourage promising beginners to go forward with their writing.
An essential distinction between the Freshman Awards and the Minor Awards on the one hand, and the Major Awards on the other is that the first group are prizes given to manuscripts, the second group is intended to permit promising authors to develop. Accordingly the basis of judgment in the major awards, competition for which is confined to senior and graduate students, is the literary promise of the individual rather than the excellence of a particular manuscript; and a person winning all or part of a major award is expected to submit to the committee a plan showing that he proposes to spend his prize money for his development as a writer and how he proposes to spend it. The committee feels that it was Mr. Hopwood's purpose to encourage promising poets, dramatists, essayists, and writers of fiction, and that it can best fulfill both the letter and the spirit of the bequest in this division of the contests by selecting the most promising writers, freeing them, wholly or in part, from their financial burdens for a year, and giving them the privilege of devoting their time during this period to literary composition.
While the terms of the bequest confine the contest to "students in the Department of Rhetoric," the committee has interpreted this phrase in a broad and liberal manner, and in fact the contests are open to any student in the university who, during an academic year, has been enrolled in one course in composition, either in the Department of English or in the Department of Journalism, for one semester, and who fulfills the minimum requirements for residence in the University at all. In thus keeping the competitions generally open, the committee has been governed by one or two important considerations. One is that the committee is eager to discover talent wherever it exists. Another is that the committee feels that the new, the unusual, and the radical is quite as likely to be discovered in economics or history or science or philosophy as it is in literature. In line with this reasoning, the committee has also broadened the definition of the essay to include formal expository articles and complete treatises when these possess the appropriate literary qualities, and is fully as desirous of securing biography, treatments of social science and politics, manuscripts dealing with aesthetic or philosophic problems, or work for the general reader having to do with the sciences, as it is to secure promising novels or plays.
The central problem of the Hopwood contests is obviously to seek out and secure individual students who are mature enough to deserve the large awards offered in the major contest. The problem is a double one. On the one hand, students engaged in a full academic program are not likely to be able to create a full-length novel of sufficient artistic maturity to be a serious competitor for the prize. On the other hand, the contest must be confined to the student body. The working solution here is to demand only the minimum academic requirements of such contestants, and to attract to the University promising writers who may benefit by the advice to be obtained in composition courses and by enrollment in the Senior class or in the Graduate School. This year, accordingly, the committee has undertaken to make the Hopwood Contests nationally known, and, to judge from the inquiries which have already come in, it is likely that Ann Arbor will in time be the home of a group of promising young writers and students brought here by the Hopwood contest and by the appeal of the University to them.
The committee in charge, of which Dean J. R. Effinger is Chairman and Professor Bennett Weaver is Secretary, realizes that it will take a period of years before the full effect of the Hopwood contests is felt in the University and in literature. Doubtless some of the money will go to individuals who will never fulfill their original promise. But if in the course of ten years the Hopwood prizes shall have set another Eugene O'Neill, another Sinclair Lewis, or another Stuart Chase upon the path of his career, they will amply have justified their donor in his hope that the University of Michigan shall produce new, unusual and radical thought and writing.
The Michigan Alumnus
April 2, 1932, page 465
