All Past National Book Critics Circle Award Winners and Finalists

Every year, the National Book Critics Circle presents awards for the finest books published in English. Below are the past winners and finalists for all National Book Critics Circle annual awards, from 1975 to present.

1975 Winners

• Fiction: E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime
• General Nonfiction: R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (Harper & Row)
• Poetry: John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking)
• Criticism: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press)

1976 Awards

Fiction Winner

• John Gardner, October Light (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Renata Adler, Speedboat (Random)
• Vladimir Nabokov, Details of a Sunset and Other Stories (McGraw-Hill)
• Cynthia Ozick, Bloodshed and Three Novellas (Knopf)
• Richard Yates, The Easter Parade (Delacorte)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• George Dangerfield, The Damnable Question: A Study in Anglo-Irish Relations (Atlantic-Little, Brown)
• Alex Haley, Roots (Doubleday)
• Irving Howe with Kenneth Libo, World of Our Fathers (Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich)
• Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (Knopf)

Poetry Winner

• Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Poetry Finalists

• Philip Levine, The Names of the Lost (Atheneum)
• Muriel Rukeyser, The Gates (McGraw-Hill)
• Louis Simpson, Searching for the Ox (Morrow)
• Richard Wilbur, The Mind-Reader (Harcourt)

Criticism Winner

• Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Knopf).

Criticism Finalists

• Ada Louise Huxtable, Kicked a Building Lately? (Quadrangle)
• Steven Marcus, Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (Random)
• Charles Rosen, Arnold Shoenberg (Viking)
• E.B. White, ed. by Dorothy Lobrano Guth, Letters of E.B. White (Harper & Row)

1977 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (Knopf).

Fiction Finalists

• John Cheever, Falconer (Knopf)
• Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer (Simon & Schuster)
• Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• John Sayles, Union Dues (Atlantic-Little, Brown)

General Nonfiction Winner

• W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich).

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Michael Herr, Dispatches (Knopf)
• David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (Simon & Schuster)
• John McPhee, Coming into the Country (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (Random)

Poetry Winner

• Robert Lowell, Day By Day (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Poetry Finalists

• John Ashbery, Houseboat Days (Viking)
• Stanley Plumly, Out-of-the-Body Travel (Ecco/Viking)
• W.D. Snodgrass, The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (Boa)
• Gerald Stern, Lucky Life (Houghton)

Criticism Winner

• Susan Sontag, On Photography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Criticism Finalists

• Arlene Croce, Afterimages (Knopf)
• Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (Basic)
• Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (Oxford University Press)
• Gore Vidal, Matters of Fact and of Fiction: Essays, 1973-1976 (Random)

1978 Awards

Fiction Winner

• John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• John Updike, The Coup (Knopf)
• Mary Gordon, Final Payments (Random)
• John Irving, The World According to Garp (Robbins/Dutton)
• Charles Simmons, Wrinkles (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

General Nonfiction Winners

• Maureen Howard, Facts of Life (Little, Brown)
• Garry Willis, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Doubleday)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (Knopf)
• Theodore H. White, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (Harper & Row)
• Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (Pantheon)
• Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (Pantheon)
• A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (Congdon/Dutton)
• Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (Knopf)
• Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (Viking)
• Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (Viking)

Poetry Winner

• Peter Davison, ed., Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (Atlantic-Little, Brown)

Poetry Finalists

• Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977 (Norton)
• Mark Strand, The Late Hour (Atheneum)
• May Swenson, New & Selected Things Taking Place (Atlantic-Little, Brown)
• John Hollander, Spectral Emanations: New and Selected Poems (Atheneum)

Criticism Winner

• Meyer Schapior, Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries, Selected Papers (Braziller)

Criticism Finalists

• Malcolm Cowley, And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History, 1918-1978 (Viking)
• Eudora Welty, The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (Random)
• Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Pantheon)
• William H. Gass, The World Within the Word: Essays (Knopf)

1979 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Thomas Flanagan, The Year of the French (Holt, Rinehart & Winston)

Fiction Finalists

• Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• William Styron, Sophie's Choice (Random)
• Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song: A True Life Novel (Little, Brown)
• Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (Random)
• Leslie Epstein, King of the Jews: A Novel of the Holocaust (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Telford Taylor, Munich: The Price of Peace (Doubleday)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Joan Didion, White Album (Simon & Schuster)
• Edward Hoagland, African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan (Random)
• Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Brain (Basic)

Poetry Winner

• Philip Levine, Ashes and 7 Years from Somewhere (Atheneum)

Poetry Finalists

• Anthony Hecht, The Venetian Vespers (Atheneum)
• John Hollander, Blue Wine and Other Poems (Johns Hopkins)
• David Smith, Goshawk, Antelope (Illinois)
• Howard Moss, Notes from the Castle (Atheneum)

Criticism Winner

• Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random)

Criticism Finalists

• Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Atlantic-Little, Brown)
• Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale)
• Robert Alter with Carol Cosman, A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal (Basic)

1980 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus (Viking)

Fiction Finalists

• E.L. Doctorow, Loon Lake (Random House)
• Anne Tyler, Morgan's Passing (Knopf)
• Walker Percy, The Second Coming (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Ronald Steel, Walter Lippman and the American Century (Atlantic-Little, Brown)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin)
• Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (Knopf)
• John Boswell, Christianity, Socail Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the 14th Century (University of Chicago Press)
• Justin D. Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life (Simon & Schuster)

Poetry Winner

• Frederick Seidel, Sunrise (Viking/Penguin)

Poetry Finalists

• Joseph Brodsky, A Part of Speech (Farrar, Straus & Grioux)
• Robert Penn Warren, Being Here: Poetry, 1977-1980 (Random House)
• James Schuyler, The Morning of the Poem (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• James Merrill, Scripts for the Pageant (Atheneum)

Criticism Winner

• Helen Vendler, Part of Nature: Modern American Poets (Harvard University Press).

Criticism Finalists

• Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (Oxford University Press)
• R.P. Blackmur, ed. by Veronica A. Makowsky, Henry Adams (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by Fredson Bowers, Lectures on Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875

1981 Awards

Fiction Winner

• John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise (Knopf)
• Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (Summit)
• Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories (Putnam)
• Leonard Michaels, The Men's Club (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of a Man (Norton)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• James Fallows, National Defense (Random House)
• T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Pantheon)
• Dumas Malone, The Sage of Monticello: Jefferson and His Time, Volume Six (Little, Brown)
• Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (University of Pennsylvania Press)

Poetry Winner

• A.R. Ammons, A Coast of Trees (Norton)

Poetry Finalists

• Douglas Crase, The Revisionist (Little, Brown)
• Daniel Hoffman, Brotherly Love (Random House/Vintage)
• Donald Finkel, What Manner of Beast (Atheneum)
• Edward Hirsch, The Sleepwalkers (Knopf)

Criticism Winner

• Virgil Thomson, A Virgil Thomson Reader (Houghton Mifflin)

Criticism Finalists

• Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (North Point Press)
• Martin Gardner, Science: Good, Bad and Bogus (Prometheus Books)
• Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (Viking)
• Thomas G. Bergin, Boccaccio (Viking)

1982 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Stanley Elkin, George Mills (Dutton)

Fiction Finalists

• Cynthia Ozick, Levitation: Five Fictions (Knopf)
• Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (Knopf)
• Alice Walker, The Color Purple (HBJ)
• Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh and Other Stories (Harper & Row)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age, George F. Keenan (Pantheon)
• Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (Knopf)
• Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe, Stolen Lightning
• Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood (Viking)

Poetry Winner

• Katha Pollitt, Antarctic Traveller (Knopf)

Poetry Finalists

• Jack Gilbert, Monoliths: Poems, 1962 and 1982 (Knopf)
• Brad Leithauser, Hundreds of Fireflies (Knopf)
• Phyllis Janowitz, Visiting Rites (Princeton University Press)
• W.S. Merwin, Finding the Islands (North Point)

Criticism Winner

• Gore Vidal, The Second American Revolution and Other Essays, 1976-82 (Random)

Criticism Finalists

• Arlene Croce, Going to the Dance (Knopf)
• Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (S. & S.)
• Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford)
• Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon (Harvard University Press)

Ivan Sandrof/Board Award Winner

• Leslie A. Marchand, for his 12-volume edition of Byron's Letters and Journals

Ivan Sandrof/Board Award Finalists

• American Library Association
• George F. Kennan
• The Library of America
• Malcolm Cowley

1983 Awards

Fiction Winner

• William Kennedy, Ironweed (The Viking Press)

Fiction Finalists

• Philip Roth, The Anatomy of a Lesson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Raymond Carver, Cathedral (Knopf)
• Joan Chase, During the Reign of the Queen (Haper & Row)
• Ron Loewinsohn, Magnetic Field(s) (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (Summit Books)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Roger Rosenblatt, The Price of Power (Anchor/Doubleday)
• William W. Warner, Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman (Atlantic-Little, Brown)
• Theodore Draper, Present History: On Nuclear War, Dtente and Other Controversies (Random House)
• David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters (Houghton Mifflin)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Kenneth R. Manning, Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just (Oxford University Press)
• Nicholas Gage, Eleni (Random House)
• E. Fuller Torrey, The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeth's (McGraw-Hill)
• Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle (Cornell University Press)

Poetry Winner

• James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover (Atheneum)

Poetry Finalists

• Jorie Graham, Erosion (Princeton University Press)
• Amy Clampitt, The Kingfisher (Knopf)
• Cathy Song, Picture Bride (Yale University Press)
• C.K. Williams, Tar (Random House)

Criticism Winner

• John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• John Rockwell, All American Music (Knopf)
• Cynthia Ozick, Art and Ardor: Essays (Knopf)
• Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press)
• Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Harvard University Press)

1984 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (Holt Rinehart & Winston)

Fiction Finalists

• David Leavitt, Family Dancing (Knopf)
• Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs (Random House)
• Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams (Dutton)
• Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra (Viking)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope (Cornelia and Michael Bessie/Harper and Row)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (Pantheon)
• John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers (Holt, Rinehart and Winston)
• Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books)
• Evan Connell, Son of the Morning Star (North Point Press)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-59 (Princeton University Press)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark (Princeton)
• Elinor Langer, Josephine Herbst (Atlantic/Little, Brown)
• Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (Harvard University Press)
• Paul Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet (Basic Books)

Poetry Winner

• Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living (Knopf)

Poetry Finalists

• Robert Duncan, Ground Work: Before the War (New Directions)
• Charles Wright, The Other Side of the River (Random House)
• Dick Allen, Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic (Louisiana State University Press)
• John Ashbery, A Wave (Viking)

Criticism Winner

• Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (Ecco Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era (Holt, Rinehart and Winston)
• David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (Oxford University Press)
• Roger Shattuck, The Innocent Eye (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Pantheon)

Ivan Sandrof/NBCC Award Winner

• Library of America

1985 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist (Knopf).

Fiction Finalists

• Don DeLillo, White Noise (Viking)
• Peter Taylor, The Old Forest and Other Stories (Dial)
• Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (Beech Tree/Morrow)
• Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (Simon and Schuster)

General Nonfiction Winner

• J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Tracy Kidder, House (Houghton Mifflin)
• Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford)
• Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: The Portrait of the Mexicans (Knopf)
• Eva Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (Harper and Row)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (Harper & Row)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Elizabeth Frank, Louise Bogan (Knopf)
• James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Leonard Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (Knopf)
• Michael Lesy, Visible Light: Four Creative Biographies (Times Books)

Poetry Winner

• Louise Gluck, The Triumph of Achilles (Ecco Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Amy Clampitt, What the Light was Like (Knopf)
• Gjertude Schnackenberg, The Lamplit Answer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Galway Kinnell, The Past (Houghton Mifflin)
• James Merrill, Late Settings (Atheneum)

Criticism Winner

• William Gass, Habitations of the World (Simon & Schuster)

Criticism Finalists

• Paul Robinson, Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (Harper and Row)
• Robert Storey, Pierrots on the Stage of Desire: 19th Century French Literary Artistis and Comic Pantomine (Princeton)
• Phillip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the AmericanNovel (Oxford)
• Mary McCarthy, Occasional Prose: Essays (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)

1986 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Louise Erdrich, The Best Queen (Holt)
• Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden (Atheneum)
• Thomas Williams, The Moon Pinnace (Doubleday)
• John Updike, Roger's Version (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (Scribner's)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (Knopf)
• Jonathan Evan Maslow, Bird of Life, Bird of Death: A Naturalist's Journey Through a Land of Political Turmoil (Simon & Schuster)
• John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon)
• Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (Viking)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I: 1902-1941 (Oxford)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Jonathan Brown, Velazquez: Painter and Courtier (Yale)
• Theodore Rosengarten, Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter (Morrow)
• Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale (Pantheon)
• Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 (Princeton)

Poetry Winner

• Edward Hirsch, Wild Gratitude (Oxford)

Poetry Finalists

• Irving Feldman, All of Us Here and Other Poems (Elisabeth Sifton/Viking)
• Brad Leithauser, Cats of the Temple (Knopf)
• Timothy Steele, Sapphics Against Anger (Random House)
• Anne Winters, The Key to the City (University of Chicago)

Criticism Winner

• Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Finalists

• Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950: Vols. 5 & 6 (Yale)
• Jerrold Siegel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics and Boundaries of Bourgeois Life (Elisabeth Sifton/Viking)
• Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (Oxford)
• Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (Columbia University Press)

1987 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Philip Roth, The Counterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction Finalists

• Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief (Knopf)
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (Knopf)
• Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (Random House)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (S&S)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic (St. Martin's)
• James Miller, "Democracy Is in the Streets," (S&S)
• Charles Mee, The Genius of the People (Harper & Row)
• Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Harvard University)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Donald Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Work, His World (Dutton)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (Harper & Row)
• Prudence Crowther, ed., Don't Tread on Me: The Selected Letters of S.J. Perelman
• Paul Taylor, Private Domain (Knopf)
• Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (Grove Press)

Poetry Winner

• C.K. Williams, Flesh and Blood (FS&G)

Poetry Finalists

• John Ashbery, April Galleons (Viking)
• Alan Shapiro, Happy Hour (University of Chicago)
• May Swenson, In Other Words (Knopf)
• Donald Justice, The Sunset Maker (Atheneum)

Criticism Winner

• Edwin Denby, Dance Writings (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• Robert Lowell, Collected Prose (FS&G)
• Guy Davenport, Every Force Evolves a Form (North Point Press)
• Arlene Croce, Sight Lines (Knopf)
• Josephn Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (Knopf)

Ivan Sandrof/NBCC Board Award Winner

• Robert Giroux

Reviewer's Citation Winner

• Josh Rubins

Reviewer's Citation Finalists

• Mindy Aloff
• William Logan
• Jack Miles
• Jonathan Penner
• George Scialabba

1988 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories (Grove Press)

Fiction Finalists

• Don DeLillo, Libra (Viking)
• Pete Dexter, Paris Trout (Random House)
• J.F. Powers, Wheat That Springeth Green (Knopf)
• Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories (Atlantic Monthly Press)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (Simon & Schuster)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press)
• Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (Random House)
• Jane Kramer, Europeans (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Harper & Row)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• Valerie Eliot, ed., The Letters of T.S. Eliot, 1909-1922 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• Paul Jay, ed., The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981 (Viking)
• Robert Wright, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information (Times Books)

Poetry Winner

• Donald Hall, The One Day (Ticknor & Fields)

Poetry Finalists

• Richard Wilbur, New and Collected Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• John Hollander, Harp Lake (Knopf)
• Kenneth Koch, One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays (Knopf)
• Thomas McGrath, Selected Poems, 1938-1988 (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism Winner

• Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford University Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (Pantheon)
• Richard A. Posner, Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (Harvard University Press)
• John Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (Yale University Press)
• Robert Pinsky, Poetry and the World (Ecco Press)

Reviewer's Citation Winner

• William Logan

Reviewer's Citation Finalists

• Bruce Bawer
• Adam Hochschild
• James Marcus
• Phyllis Rose
• George Scialabba

1989 Awards

Fiction Winner

• E.L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate (Random House)

Fiction Finalists

• Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (Putnam)
• Oscar Hijeulos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Jane Smiley, Ordinary Love & Good Will (Knopf)
• John Casey, Spartina (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord (Harper & Row)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Tracy Kidder, Among Schoolchildren (Houghton Mifflin)
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (Pantheon)
• David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922 (Henry Holt)
• Amy Wilentz, The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (Simon & Schuster)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (Harper & Row)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Bil Gilbert, And God Gave Us This Country: Tekamthi and the First American Civil War (Atheneum)
• Otto Friedrich, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations (Random House)
• Roger Moris, Richard Milhouse Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician (Henry Holt)
• Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life: A Memoir (Atlantic Monthly Press)

Poetry Winner

• Rodney Jones, Transparent Gestures (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry Finalists

• August Kleinzahler, Earthquake Weather (Moyer Bell Ltd.)
• Robert Hass, Human Wishes (Ecco Press)
• Thylias Moss, Pyramid of Bone (University Press of Virginia)
• Nancy Willard, Water Walker (Knopf)

Criticism Winner

• John Clive, Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• William L. Vance, America's Rome (Yale University Press)
• David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Harvard University Press)
• Charles Solomon, Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation (Knopf)
• Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor & Memory: Essays (Knopf)

Ivan Sandrof/NBCC Board Award Winner

• James Laughlin, founder and publisher of New Directions, for his distinguished contribution to American letters

1990 Awards

Fiction Winner

• John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (Atheneum)
• Sue Miller, Family Pictures (HarperCollins)
• Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (Seymour Lawrence/Houghton Mifflin)
• Wallace Stegner, Collected Stories (Random House)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (St. Martin's)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso)
• Alma Guillermoprieto, Samba (Knopf)
• O.B. Hardison, Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the 20th Century (Viking)
• Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Regan Aftermath (Random House)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Robert Caro, Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• John Espey, Strong Drink, Strong Language (John Daniel)
• Patricia O'Toole, The Five of Hearts: an Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880-1918 (Clarkson N. Potter)
• Richard Rhodes, A Hole in the World (Simon & Schuster)
• T.H. Watkins, Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes (Holt)

Poetry Winner

• Amy Gerstler, Bitter Angel (Nort Point)

Poetry Finalists

• Frank Bidart, In the Western Night (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• John Haines, New Poems, 1980-88 (Story Line Press)
• Anthony Hecht, The Transparent Man (Knopf)
• Charles Simic, The Book of Gods and Devils (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)

Criticism Winner

• Arthur Danto, Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Finalists

• Stanley Crouch, Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989 (Oxford University Press)
• Irving Howe, Selected Writings, 1950-1990 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• Camille Paglia, Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press)
• Wilfrid Sheed, Essays in Disguise (Knopf)

Ivan Sandorf/NBCC Board Award Winner

• Donald Keene

1991 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Louis Begley, Wartime Lies (Knopf)
• Gish Jen, Typical American (Houghton Mifflin)
• Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations (Morrow)
• Norman Rush, Making (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (Crown)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You on? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back (FSG)
• Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for Sheetrock (Addison-Wesley)
• Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (Crown)
• Dennis Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe (HarperCollins)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Philip Roth, Patrimony: A True Story (Simon & Schuster)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever (Knopf)
• Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (Scribners)
• Diane Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin)
• Art Spiegelman, Maus II (Pantheon)

Poetry Winner

• Albert Goldbarth, Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology (Georgia)

Poetry Finalists

• Diane Ackerman, Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New & Selected Poems (Random House)
• Allen Grossman, The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New & Selected (1979-1991) (New Directions)
• Philip Levine, What Work Is (Knopf)
• Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World (Norton)

Criticism Winner

• Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (Yale)

Criticism Finalists

• Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works & Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (Morrow)
• J. Hoberman, Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media (Temple Univ. Press)
• Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (Talese/Doubleday)
• John Updike, Old Jobs (Knopf)

Reviewer's Citation Winner

• George Scialabba

1992 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Randall Kenan, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water (Dutton)
• Richard Price, Clockers (Houghton Mifflin)
• Robert Stone, Outerbridge Reach (Ticknor & Fields)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire (University of Chicago Press)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (Thames & Hudson)
• Donald Katz, Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America (HarperCollins)
• Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyay Life in Brazil (University of California Press)
• Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Harvard University Press)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (Clarkson N. Potter)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Jack Beatty, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958 (Addison-Wesley)
• Paul Hendrickson, Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (Knopf)
• Walter Isaacson, Kissinger (Simon & Schuster)
• Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Harvard University Press)

Poetry Winner

• Hayden Carruth, Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991 (Copper Canyon Press)

Poetry Finalists

• David Ferry, Gilgamesh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Maxine Kumin, Looking for Luck (W.W. Norton)
• Sharon Olds, The Father (Knopf)
• K.C. Williams, A Dream of Mine (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Winner

• Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remand America (Simon & Schuster)

Criticism Finalists

• Frederick Crews, The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy (Random House)
• Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (Graywolf Press)
• Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (Doubleday)
• Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (Random House)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Elizabeth Ward

Ivan Sandrof Award Winner

• Gregory Rabassa

1993 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News (Scribners)
• Bobbi Ann Mason, Feather Crowns (Harper)
• Frances Sherwood, Vindication (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Rikki Ducornet, The Jade Cabinet (Dalkey Archive Press)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (Pantheon)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Rosemary Mahoney, Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age (Houghton Mifflin)
• George B. Schaller, The Last Panda (Chicago)
• Russ Rymer, Genie: An Abused Child's Flight From Silence (Harper)
• David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (Random House)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Edmund White, Genet (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• James Merrill, A Different Person (Knopf)
• James Miller, The Passion of Michael Foucault (Simon & Schuster)
• Alice Kaplan, French Lessons (Chicago)
• David Levering Lewis, DuBois: Biography of a Race (Holt)

Criticism Winner

• John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History (Yale)

Criticism Finalists

• Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat (Poseidon)
• Geoffrey O'Brien, The Phantom Empire (Norton)
• Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Harvard)
• Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952-1992 (Random House)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Brigitte Frase

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