Eight fellowships in creative writing were among the 132 announced April 14 by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. They went to:
Poet Randall Jarrell, identified as Sergeant Randall Jarrell. His first collection of poems, Blood From a Stranger, had been published in 1942 and his subsequent Little Friend, Little Friend, published in 1945, drew on his Army experience. He later would win the National Book Award.
Arthur Ranous Wilmurt, a playwright from Yale who had a few short-lived productions on Broadway.
James Still, author of On Troublesome Creek. He wrote mostly about Appalachia.
Gwendolyn Brooks, African-American poet who won acclaim for A Street in Bronzeville and later won a Pulitzer.
Virginia Eggertsen Sorenson, author of A Little Lower Than the Angels. Sorenson, who often wrote about Mormons, had a new novel, On This Star, coming out in May.
Roger Lemelin of Quebec, author of Au Pied de la Pente Douce, published in English as The Town Below.
Carson McCullers. She was a major talent who emerged in the 1940s. The Member of the Wedding was published in 1946. She had already written The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Reflections In a Golden Eye.
George Zabriskie, poet from Marietta College.
Twenty-eight year old historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. won a Guggenheim Fellowship to follow up his best selling book The Age of Jackson with a "political-intellectual" history of the New Deal. The book, The Vital Center, was published in 1949.