Fiction Winner

• William Kennedy, Ironweed (The Viking Press)

Fiction Finalists

• Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Raymond Carver, Cathedral (Knopf)
• Joan Chase, During the Reign of the Queen (Harper & 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, Children of War (Anchor/Doubleday)
• William W. Warner, Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman (Atlantic-Little, Brown)
• Theodore Draper, Present History: On Nuclear War, Detente 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)

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

• George F. Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age, (Pantheon)
• Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (Knopf)
• Daniel Lawrence O’Keefe, Stolen Lightning (Continuum)
• 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 (Simon & Schuster)
• 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

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 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)

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, Social 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 & Giroux)
• 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 (Oxford University Press)

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, The 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)

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 Schapiro, 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)

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)

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 Schoenberg (Viking)
• E.B. White, ed. by Dorothy Lobrano Guth, Letters of E.B. White (Harper & Row)

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)