Fiction Winner

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

Fiction Finalists

• E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News (Scribners)
• Bobbie 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)

Poetry Winner

• Mark Doty, My Alexandria (University of Illinois Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Donald Hall, The Museum of Clear Ideas (Ticknor & Fields)
• Linda Hogan, The Book of Medicines (Coffee House Press)
• Audre Lorde, The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance (W.W. Norton)
• Jack Marshall, Sesame (Coffee House Press)

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

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 Everyday 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)
• David McCullough, Truman (Simon & Schuster)

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

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, Mating (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 (Scribner)
• 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, Odd Jobs (Knopf)

Reviewer’s Citation Winner

• George Scialabba

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

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 Milhous 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

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 Ellmann, 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

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 (Simon & Schuster)

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, (Simon & Schuster)
• 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 (Viking)
• Paul Taylor, Private Domain (Knopf)
• Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (Grove Press)

Poetry Winner

• C.K. Williams, Flesh and Blood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

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 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Guy Davenport, Every Force Evolves a Form (North Point Press)
• Arlene Croce, Sight Lines (Knopf)
• Joseph 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

Fiction Winner

• Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden (Atheneum)

Fiction Finalists

• Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen (Holt)
• Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis (Knopf)
• Thomas Williams, The Moon Pinnacle (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)

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 Word (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 American Novel (Oxford)
• Mary McCarthy, Occasional Prose: Essays (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)

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