Pulitzer Prize Editorials: America's Best Editorial Writing, 1917-1993.

THE TITLE is misleading.

The editorials that win the Pulitzer Prize aren't always "America's best." Some are dull. Some are awkward. Some are dumb. Some are ill-reasoned, some ill-written, some ill-conceived.

They just happened to win.

Some, of course, are perfect. They challenge and charm. Some of the best newspaper writers in this country -- William Allen White, Gene Patterson, Vermont Royster -- have been editorial writers and Pulitzer winners, and rarely can you quibble with a word or a thought of men like that.

But would you give a Pulitzer to an editorial that starts: "In the Register's opinion, the statement about America's role in the world ahead that was adopted by the national executive committee of the American Legion Friday is one of the notable contributions of our time to statesmanlike public leadership."

Huh?

That was Forrest W. Seymour's winner for The Des Moines Register in 1943. Surely, somebody, somewhere -- perhaps everybody, everywhere -- had better stuff that year.

But that's one nice thing about this book, which has editorials by the Pulitzer Prize winners for every year since the prizes were established in 1917. As an editorial writer, you'll love it -- because you'll realize that your editorials are better than many past winners.

Read this book, and you'll convince yourself that you'll win next year.

Read this book, too, and you'll learn a lot about writing.

"I worked over the phraseology of that editorial," William Allen White said about his 1923 winner. "I cut out every adjective and used a verb instead, which greatly strengthens one's style. I shortened it, avoiding repetition, and finally ran it out."

Here, 25 years later, is Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and 1948 winner, talking about editorial pages in general:

An editorial page "must be dedicated to the welfare of all the people, not merely to the interest of one exclusive and fortunate class. . . . More money will have to be spent on it, and more talent allotted to it. Then readers will turn to it in the expectation of being informed, stimulated, or amused, not in the confident knowledge that they will find there the same old sloppily written pontifications, the same dreary and bumbling half-truths. . . . The effective editorial page . . . should be put together with some consideration for style, it must be vigorous, independent and free, and its judgments must have perspective, while permeating the whole there must be a passionate concern for the truth."

And here, two generations after that, is Richard Aregood, editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Daily News and 1985 winner:

"A big thing missing in lots of editorial pages is passion; I have this feeling that many people writing about stuff don't really care about it. Some don't have the passion. The way most journalists think about editorial pages now, it's kind of a bloodless thing, even a committee thing."

What about the writing itself?. "Tone and timing are the secrets in any kind of writing."

The compilers of these editorials, journalism professors Wm. David Sloan and NCEW member Laird B. Anderson, add immensely to the book by providing those headnotes -- usually a half-page or less -- telling a bit about the writer or the editorial or the times. Sometimes, they offer their opinions about an editorial, which aren't needed. You can decide for yourself whether Meg Greenfield's Washington Post editorials are "pedestrian," whether Phil Geyelin's Washington Post winner "tried to cover too wide a subject." (I think the authors are wrong on both counts.)

This book, besides being a primer on writing, is a text on history. The first winner, a 1916 editorial in The New York Tribune one year after the sinking of the Lusitania, readied Americans for entering World War I. Later editorials talked of other wars.

And throughout, from the 1920s to the 1970s, are editorials on race. Want some strong stuff? Grover Cleveland Hall was editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, and a vigorous foe of the Ku Klux Klan. Here's what he wrote about Alabama Senator Tom Heflin in 1927:

"A bully by nature, a mountebank by instinct, a Senator by choice. Conceited and vain as the peacock is, but not proud as the nobleman is. . . . He is bombastic and blustery."

That was the start, and he was just warming up. "In controversy, he is intellectually without scruples, he is slanderous, cruel, cheap and absurd, and without a generous emotion." Still later: "He is ill-informed, inaccurate in thought and unreliable in statement." And near the end: "Thus this preposterous blob excites our pity if not our respect."

They may still make politicians like that these days, but they don't make editorial writers like Grover Cleveland Hall. And that's too bad.

For the editorial page should be the soul of a newspaper. It should assail the outrageous, laud the outstanding, and defend the outcast. Its editorials should be thoroughly reported, soundly reasoned, and gracefully written. Its editor should know his town and love his town -- know it so well he can explain it clearly, love it so much he can attack it dearly.

If an editor and an editorial page can do all that, and if he doesn't mind the phone calls and catcalls -- "I don't mind being the object of controversy," Wall Street Journal editor Bob Bartley says in this book. "That's how I make my living" -- then the newspaper and the town will have an editor and editorials to be proud of.

And that's better than a Pulitzer Prize.

Michael Gartner is editor and co-owner of The Daily Tribune in Ames, Iowa, a past chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, and the 1994 winner of the American Society of Newspaper Editor's Distinguished Writing Award for Editorials.