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<\/a><\/p>\nnonfiction, juvenile fiction and nonfiction, poetry, and biography. The awards have gone to some highly decorated authors and to some who have never received an award before, and to many who never received one again. But always, the awards recognize the best that Midwestern literature had to offer in the prior year. I have served many times over the past 20 years as a judge for those awards, in either adult nonfiction or biography, and I have had the privilege of announcing the award a few times. I have bestowed the award on people like Garry Wills<\/a> (James Madison<\/em>) and Kathleen Norris<\/a> (Dakota: A Spiritual Geography<\/em>).<\/p>\n In addition to the book awards, the Society has incorporated into its ceremonies an award for literary criticism by absorbing it from the now defunct Friends of Literature. And, when the board feels there is a deserving recipient, it also provides a Distinguished Service Award to someone members feel has made significant contributions to the organization. As was noted the other night, there have been stalwarts in the past\u2014more than a few of them, it seems, because the Society in 2015 will celebrate its centennial. Established in 1915, benefiting in its earliest history from a honorary visit by William Butler Yeats<\/a>, the Society\u2019s founders and early members included the likes of Vachel Lindsay<\/a>, Harriet Monroe<\/a>, Sherwood Anderson<\/a>, Edna Ferber<\/a>, and Carl Sandburg<\/a>. How do you beat that combination? The century that followed brought more luminaries\u2014Gwendolyn Brooks<\/a>, Studs Terkel<\/a>, and Scott Turow<\/a>, among them. I am sure I am missing many others, but you get the point. We counted among our membership the best of the Midwest, and they have often spoken to us, and speak to us still, at monthly programs and yearly banquets. As president of the Society, from 1997-1999, I once paired Scott Turow and Jacquelyn Mitchard<\/a> for a program on \u201cHitting the Jackpot with Your First Book.\u201d The Society hit the jackpot, too, with a splendidly lively program.<\/p>\n In the midst of this rarefied company, it is a bit humbling to get any award at all. But the board felt my time had come because I had served, at various times, as president, vice-president, membership secretary, treasurer, book judge, and board member, not to mention newsletter editor. It was pointed out that I gave the newsletter its current name, Literary License.<\/em> That was not hard. The title came in one of those moments one suffers of instant illumination. Big deal: It happens to writers all the time, right? Well, not exactly. It happens after a writer lets his brain cogitate on a problem long enough that all the bad ideas drift to the bottom, like silt in the river, fertilizing and facilitating the one good idea that finally rises to the top.<\/p>\n And I guess that\u2019s mostly why I got this honor. It\u2019s not about me, at least not completely or even primarily. It\u2019s about the inspiration and perspiration involved in wanting to see to it that a deserving organization that has long been an essential part of the Chicago and Midwestern cultural scene gets to last into a second century, to respond to new challenges. Because the Society is an organization into which writers with at least one published book \u201cof literary merit\u201d must be invited, it is precisely the type of organization that is capable of stumbling into irrelevance if its leadership allows the membership to age and mellow until no one can remember its heyday anymore. In the late 1990s, as membership secretary, I would hunt down new authors eligible to be invited, and bring dozens of nominations to each meeting of the board of directors for approval, to assure that the pipeline was full of new blood, and the organization stayed fresh and relevant, and it did and it has. That tradition of recruitment of those often less noticed has continued under other leadership for more than a decade since I served as president, and I don\u2019t worry about it so much anymore. New members join every year.<\/p>\n Still, I can\u2019t say as many responded to our invitations as I might have liked. As my late friend Timothy Unsworth<\/a> once told me, \u201cJim, there\u2019s a high nut factor in any group of artists.\u201d I learned that first-hand one day when a prospective member contacted me. \u201cIs it too late to join?\u201d the person wanted to know. He had a letter of invitation I had sent him, but it had gotten lost in his mail pile until he had rediscovered it, two years later. I told him there was no statute of limitations on such an invitation. The guy joined. Years later, when we awarded the biography prize to Sam Weller<\/a>, for The Bradbury Chronicles,<\/em> he related a similar incident during his work with Ray Bradbury<\/a>. At Bradbury\u2019s home in Los Angeles one day, Welller stumbled upon a $200,000 royalty check buried in a mountain of papers. When he reported it to the author, Bradbury merely said, \u201cI wondered where that was.\u201d Some of our nuts are very prosperous. And a quirky joy to work with. I am simply proud to have had the opportunity to help such an organization survive.<\/p>\n