The Best Applause

Just how much famed radio writer Norman Corwin meant to future novelist Philip Roth listening at home with his family in the 1940s comes alive in a delightful story Roth related after winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his novel American Pastoral published the year before. 

Asked by interviewer and author Bill Parkhurst about writing influences when he was young, Roth said the greatest influence in his teenage years was Corwin’s radio broadcasts. Roth added that the two writers had not yet met in real life but had become good friends talking on the telephone. Roth then told the following story:

“.…One of the most pleasant aspects of the Pulitzer Prize was that the day, whenever it was two or three weeks ago, when I got home, I found 40 messages on my answering machine. Four, zero, which I didn’t know the machine could do. And I didn’t know what had happened because I’d been out all day. So I thought one of two things had happened, I thought either I had died and these were condolence calls coming in or I’d won something. And it turned out that I’d won the Pulitzer Prize…. 

In among the messages, there was a message from Norman who was now 90 (actually 88 since born May 3, 1910). And I found the only emotional moment I had listening to all those tapes -- of course, I was pleased -- was when I heard this guy, this guy’s voice. And I called him the next day. And I said, you know, it’s no easy thing emotionally, to get a phone call from your boyhood hero who says, very good, you’ve done very well. So you know, when you’re a kid, you respond to, of course, different kinds of writing than you will as an adult. But there was something passionate in this radio writer, something deeply American in him. There was a tremendous amount of what I took to be political goodwill. And all these things were very, very provocative for a 14 or 15 -year -old.”

Norman Corwin’s radio programs in the 1930s and 40s covered many topics and were influential in part because they were dramatic and entertaining, often addressing serious issues by telling how they affected the lives of participants and listeners. His famous program “On a Note of Triumph,” celebrated the Allied victory in Europe, and was broadcasted on VE Day, May 8, 1945. He had a long career as a writer and journalist dying at the age of 101 in 2011. Roth owned three print copies of On a Note of Triumph, one of which included an inscription by Corwin (photo above).

Reference:

Philip Roth, I Married a Communist: Selection read by author and interview with Bill Parkhurst. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).