Prizes for Corwin

Norman Corwin, radio's 35-year-old wonder boy, enjoyed a week befitting his prestige. He won the first Wendell Willkie Award--a trip around the world, sponsored by Freedom House and the Common Council for American Unity. Skipping lightly over all other U.S. writers and artists, the two organizations thought Corwin's On a Note of Triumph and other writings the best "contributions [of 1945] to the concept of One World, in the field of mass communication."

Corwin's second prize of the week came from an equally surprising source. The Metropolitan Opera Association picked his libretto for The Warrior (music by Bernard Rogers of Rochester, N.Y.) as the best submitted in a $1,500 competition for a new American opera.

In some ways, it was practically a normal week for Corwin. Since CBS discovered him tinkering in its Workshop in 1938, the handsome, prolific writer-director-producer has scooped up a large share of radio's praise and prizes.

By radio's own standards, Corwin has produced much of radio's best. His formula is well known: staccato phrases, sharp contrasts in voices, sound effects exaggerated like a Hearst headline. Corwin's stock in trade is "the common man."

Flip Rhetoric? CBS proudly claims Corwin as its own uncommon man, repeats many of his broadcasts, gives him a free hand, lets him publish his scripts in book form. But the reaction has set in. He has been savagely lampooned by Radio Wit Abe Burrows (TIME, Feb. 11). Some call him the "poor man's MacLeish." Assessing his V-E day's On a Note of Triumph, Critic Bernard DeVoto, who rarely likes anything, wrote in Harper's:

". . . It is bad writing. . . . The reportorial and editorial aspects of radio [on V-E day] were superb. But when an acknowledged master of the art ... got to work on the same stuff, he was dull, windy, opaque, pretentious, and in the end, false."

Corwin seems somewhat worried by such criticism. Says he: "I am the kind of a guy who is terribly wounded by a failure. When I lay an egg, I am worried lest it become a chain reaction." He wishes people would stop comparing his new works with his old. "It's unfair to compare me with myself," he says. "My mind is involved and peculiar like the Pentagon Building, with several levels and ramps."

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