The passage mainly discusses ______. A．award-winning works of literature B．an organization that awards artists C．the special donation of an artist D．the individual patrons of artists
Awards are made by committee. Each of the three departments Literature (120 members), Art (83), Music (47)—has a committee dealing with its own field Committee membership rotates every year, so that new voices and opinions are constantly heard.
The most financially rewarding of all the Academy-Institute awards are the Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings. Harold Strauss, a devoted editor at Alfred A. Knopf, the New York publishing house, and Mildred Strauss, his wife, were wealthy and childless. They left the Academy-Institute a unique bequest (遗赠): for five consecutive years, two distinguished (and financially needy) writers would receive enough money so they could devote themselves entirely to "prose literature" (no plays, no poetry, and no paying job that might distract). In 1983, the first Strauss Livings of ＄35,000 a year went to short-story writer Raymond Carver and novelist-essayist Cynthia Ozick. By 1988, the fund had grown enough so that two winners, novelists Diane Johnson and Robert Stone, each got ＄50,000 a year for five years.