History
Mrs. Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt was the eldest sister of Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th President of the United States. Born in 1910 in Stonewall, Texas, she worked in the cataloging department of the Library of Congress in the 1930's before her brother entered politics. Whilst there, she met college student Oscar Price (O.P) Bobbitt, who also worked in the department. Bobbitt courted Rebekah with love poems typed on index cards and passed secretly to her under the nose of supervisors. After marrying, they returned to Texas and began a family. She died in 1978.
Established in her memory in 1988 by her son, Professor Philip C. Bobbitt, and her husband, the Bobbitt prize was the first national poetry award given in almost 40 years. In 1949, Congress placed a 40-year ban on Library prizes following controversy over the Library's awarding of the 1948 Bollingen National Prize for Poetry to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos. Following the public outcry at the time of the award to Pound, the Joint Congressional Committee on the Library of Congress in 1949 adopted a policy prohibiting the Library henceforth from granting any more awards or prizes.
James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, is quoted as stating: "The family relation to the Library is a great love story and it is too good not to want to savor, commemorate and celebrate."
Three-time Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, said of the Prize in 2000, “I don’t know of any other literary prize that has such a high standard.”
Read more about this topic: Bobbitt National Prize For Poetry
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