1929

Winner: Benbow Sartoris1

Winning Word: cloudbrooded

Used in a Sentence: “…the lonely eagles aloft in blue sunshot space surrounded and enclosed by mountains cloudbrooded, taller than God.”

Prize: A bumpy ride in an experimental aeroplane.

1930

Winner: Vardaman Bundren

Winning Word: pussel-gutted2

Used in a Sentence: “He has pussel-gutted himself eating cold greens.”

Prize: A gravedigging shovel.

1931

Winner: Elmer Hodge II

Winning Word: lopbranched

Used in a Sentence: “…a forlorn and hardy tree of some shabby species––gaunt, lopbranched magnolias, a stunted elm or a locust in grayish, cadaverous bloom…”

Prize: A crumpled photograph of Little Belle.

1932

Winner: Virgil Quistenbery

Winning Word: cinderstrewnpacked

Used in a Sentence: “…set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo…”

Prize: Canner-grade crowbait.

1933

Winner: Maury Priest II

Winning Word: pinkwomansmelling

Used in a Sentence: “In the rife, pinkwomansmelling, obscurity behind the curtain he squatted, pinkfoamed…”

Prize: A yacht cruise on stagnant waters.

1934

Winner: Januarius Tull

Winning Word: thwartfacecurled

Used in a Sentence: “…the clotted and idle and equivocal men could slant their hats and their thwartfacecurled cigarettes.”

Prize: A footslog in the Pine Hills, punctuated by outbursts of masculine aggression.

1935

Winner: Launcelot Callicoat

Winning Word: hookwormridden

Used in a Sentence: “Then the hamlet which at its best day had borne no name listed on Post Office Department annals would not now even be remembered by the hookwormridden heirs-at-large who pulled the buildings down and buried them in cookstoves and winter grates.”

Prize: A tainted case of alcoholic sassprilluh.

1936

Winner: Euphrony Corinthia Rouncewell

Winning Word: phoenixbastions

Used in a Sentence: “‘Yair,’ he thought, ‘tiered Q pickles of one thousand worn oftcarried phoenixbastions of rented cunts.’”

Prize: A dog-eared copy of the Yoknapatawpha County Criminal Code, Volume IV: Laws of Anti-Miscegenation.

1937

Winner: Georgie Barger

Winning Word: stippleprop.

Used in a Sentence: “…the ten thousand inescapable mornings wherein ten thousand airplants swinging stippleprop the soft scrofulous soaring of sweating brick and ten thousand pairs of splayed brown hired Leonorafeet tigerbarred by jaloused armistice with the invincible sun: the thin black coffee, the myriad fish stewed in myriad oil––tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow; not only not to hope, not even to wait: just to endure.”

Prize: A mildewed portrait of Governor Compson

1938

Winner: Beasley Hogganbeck

Winning Word: painwebbed

Used in a Sentence: “Above the shuffle and murmur of feet in the lobby and above the clash and clatter of crockery in the restaurant the amplified voice still spoke, profound and effortless, as though it were the voice of the steel-and-chromium mausoleum itself talking of creatures imbued with motion though not with life and incomprehensible to the puny crawling painwebbed globe, incapable of suffering, wombed and born complete and instantaneous, cunning intricate and deadly, from out some blind iron batcave of the earth’s prime foundation…”

Prize: Lessons of darkness in the Big Woods.

1939

Winner: Wallstreet Panic Snopes III

Winning Word: chimaerashape

Used in a Sentence: “The thick heavy air was full now of a smell thicker, heavier, though there was yet no water in sight: there was only the soft pale sharp chimaerashape above which pennons floated against a further drowsy immensity which the mind knew must be water, apparently separated from the flat earth by a mirageline so that, taking shape now as a doublewinged building, it seemed to float lightly like the apocryphal turreted and battlemented cities in the colored Sunday sections, where beneath sillless and floorless arches people with yellow and blue flesh pass and repass: myriad, purposeless, and free from gravity.”

Prize: A long strand of iron-gray hair.

1940

Winner: “Baby” Grove

Winning Word: tinseldung

Used in a Sentence: “‘It’s making toward four,’ he thought, thinking, wondering if it were actually dawn which he felt, or that anyway the dark globe on which people lived had passed the dead point at which the ill and the weary were supposed to be prone to die and now it was beginning to turn again, soon beginning to spin again out of the last laggard reluctance of darkness––the garblement which was the city: the scabby hoppoles which elevated the ragged palmcrests like the monstrous broomsage out of an old country thought, the spent stage of last night’s clatterfalque Nilebarge supine now beneath today’s white wings treadling, the hydrantgouts gutterplaited with the trodden tinseldung of stars.”

Prize: A leech, engorged on bad blood.

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1 The last Sartoris to win this award.

2 The last hyphenate allowed in competition.

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Sources of winning words and sentences:

1929: Mosquitos
1930: As I Lay Dying
1931: Sanctuary
1932-35: Light in August
1936-40: Pylon