Prizes Are For Boys

By 1947, Charles Ives had built the largest life-insurance agency in America, invented modern estate planning, and not written a note of music in twenty years. For decades he had composed on nights, weekends, and vacations in a farmhouse in West Redding, Connecticut, scoring polytonal symphonies while running the firm by day. Almost nobody had heard any of it.

This did not appear to bother him.

In 1922 he self-printed 114 of his own songs, wrote a postface explaining that he had "merely cleaned house," and mailed copies free to anyone who asked. The Concord Sonata, finished around 1915, sat in a drawer until a pianist named John Kirkpatrick premiered it at Town Hall in 1939, roughly a quarter century late.

Then in 1947, the Pulitzer committee awarded him the prize in music for his Third Symphony. He had finished it around 1910. It had sat in a drawer for thirty-six years.

He gave half the money to the conductor who'd dug it up.

"Prizes are for boys," he said. "I'm all grown up."