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National Book Critics Circle Award

The National Book Critics Circle Awards
1980 - 1989

Fiction 1980-1989

WINNER

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

FINALISTS

  • Loon Lake by E. L. Doctorow

  • Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler

  • The Second Coming by Percy Walker

  • So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

WINNER

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

FINALISTS

  • A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone

  • Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban

  • Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme

  • The Men's Club by Leonard Michaels

WINNER

George Mills by Stanley Elkin

FINALISTS

  • Levitation: five fictions by Cynthia Ozick

  • Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

  • The Color Purple by Alice Walker

  • Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason

WINNER

FINALISTS

  • The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth

  • Cathedral by Raymond Carver

  • During the Reign of the Queen by Joan Chase

  • Magnetic Field(s) by Ron Loewinsohn

WINNER

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

FINALISTS

  • Family Dancing by David Leavitt

  • Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie

  • Machine Dreams by Jayne Anne Phillips

  • Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr

WINNER

FINALISTS

  • White Noise by Don DeLillo

  • The Old Forest and Other Stories by Peter Taylor

  • Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers

  • Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

WINNER

Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price

FINALISTS

  • The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich

  • A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor

  • The Moon Pinnacle by Thomas Williams

  • Roger's Version by John Updike

WINNER

The Counterlife by Philip Roth

FINALISTS

  • The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley

  • Beloved by Toni Morrison

  • The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

  • Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

WINNER

The Middleman and Other Stories by Bharati Mukherjee

FINALISTS

  • Libra by Don DeLillo

  • Paris Trout by Pete Dexter

  • Wheat That Springeth Green by J. F. Powers

  • Where I'm Calling From: new and selected stories by Raymond Carver

WINNER

FINALISTS

  • The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

  • The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijeulos

  • Ordinary Love & Good Will by Jane Smiley

  • Spartina by John Casey

General Nonfiction 1980-1989

WINNER

Walter Lippman and the American Century by Ronald Steel

FINALISTS

  • Alice James: a biography by Jean Strouse

  • China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston

  • Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: gay people in Western Europe fromthe beginning of the Christian Era to the 14th century by John Boswell

  • Walt Whitman: a life by Justin D. Kaplan

WINNER

FINALISTS

  • National Defense by James Fallows

  • No Place of Grace: antimodernism and the transformation of American culture, 1880-1920 by T. J. Jackson Lears

  • The Sage of Monticello: Jefferson and his time, volume six by Dumas Malone

  • Forms of Talk by Erving Goffman

WINNER

The Path to Power: the years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro

FINALISTS

  • The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American relations in the Atomic Age by George F. Kennan

  • The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell

  • Stolen Lightning by Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe

  • Bronx Primitive: portraits in a childhood by Kate Simon

WINNER

FINALISTS

  • Children of War by Roger Rosenblatt

  • Distant Water: the fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman by William W. Warner

  • Present History: on nuclear war, detente and other controversies by Theodore Draper

  • Revolution in Time: clocks and the making of the modern world by David S. Landes

WINNER

Weapons and Hope by Freeman Dyson

FINALISTS

  • The Abandonment of the Jews by David Wyman

  • Brothers and Keepers by John Edgar Wideman

  • The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Culture by Robert Darnton

  • Son of the Morning Star by Evan Connell

WINNER

FINALISTS

  • House by Tracy Kidder

  • The Body in Pain: the making and unmaking of the world by Elaine Scarry

  • Distant Neighbors: the portrait of the Mexicans by Alan Riding

  • The Reign of the Phallus: sexual politics in ancient Athens by Eva Keuls

WINNER

Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

FINALISTS

  • Voyagers to the West: a passage in the peopling of America by Bernard Bailyn

  • Bird of Life, Bird of Death: a naturalist's journey through a land of political turmoil by Jonathan Evan Maslow

  • War Without Mercy: race and power in the Pacific war by John W. Dower

  • Cadillac Desert: the American West and its disappearing water by Marc Reisner

WINNER

FINALISTS

  • And the Band Played One: politics, people and the AIDS epidemic by Randy Shilts

  • Democracy is in the Streets by James Miller

  • The Genius of the People by Charles Mee

  • Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle by Stephen Jay Gould

WINNER

FINALISTS

  • Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War era by James M. McPherson

  • A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan

  • Europeans by Jane Kramer

  • Reconstruction: America's unfinished revolution, 1863-1877 by Eric Foner

WINNER

The Broken Cord by Michael Dorris

FINALISTS

  • Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder

  • Fear of Falling: the inner life of the middle class by Barbara Ehrenreich

  • A Peace to End All Peace: creating the modern Middle East, 1914-1922 by David Fromkin

  • The Rainy Season: Haiti since Duvalier by Amy Wilentz

Biography/Autobiography 1983-1989

WINNER

Minor Characters by Joyce Johson

FINALISTS

  • Black Apollo of Science: the life of Ernest Everett Just by Kenneth R. Manning

  • Eleni by Nicholas Gage

  • The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the secret of St. Elizabeth's by E. Fuller Torrey

  • Thomas Carlyle by Fred Kaplan

WINNER

Dostoevsky: the years of ordeal, 1850-59 by Joseph Frank

FINALISTS

  • Home Before Dark by Susan Cheever

  • Josephine Herbst by Elinor Langer

  • One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty

  • Walt Whitman: the making of a poet by Paul Zweig

WINNER

Henry James: a life by Leon Edel

FINALISTS

  • Louise Brogan by Elizabeth Frank

  • Giacometti: a biography by James Lord

  • Brigham Young: American Moses by Leonard Arrington

  • Visible Light: four creative biographies by Michael Lesy

WINNER

The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1: 1902-1941 by Arnold Rampersad

FINALISTS

  • Velazquez: painter and courtier by Jonathan Brown

  • Tombee: portrait of a cotton planter by Theodore Rosengarten

  • Maus: a survivor's tale by Art Spiegelman

  • Dostoevsky: the stir of liberation, 1860-1865 by Joseph Frank

WINNER

Chaucer: his life, his work by Donald Howard

FINALISTS

  • An American Childhood by Annie Dillard

  • Don't Tread on Me: the selected letters of S. J. Perelman by Prudence Crowther, editor

  • Private Domain by Paul Taylor

  • Timebends: a life by Arthur Miller

WINNER

FINALISTS

  • Borrowed Time: an AIDS memoir by Paul Monette

  • The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1909-1922 by Valerie Eliot, editor

  • The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981 by Paul Jay, editor

  • Three Scientists and Their Gods: looking for meaning in an age of information by Robert Wright

WINNER

A First-Class Temperament: the emergence of Franklin Roosevelt by Geoffrey C. Ward

FINALISTS

  • And God Gave Us This Country: Tekamthi and the First American Civil War by Bil Gilbert

  • Glenn Gould: a life and variations by Otto Friedrich

  • Richard Milhous Nixon: the rise of an American politician by Roger Moris

  • This Boy's Life: a memoir by Tobias Wolff

Poetry 1980-1989

WINNER

Sunrise by Frederick Seidel

FINALISTS

  • A Part of Speech by Joseph Brodsky

  • Being Here: poetry, 1977-1980 by Robert Penn Warren

  • The Morning of the Poem by James Schuyler

  • Scripts for the Pageant by James Merrill

WINNER

A Coast of Trees by A. R. Ammons

FINALISTS

  • The Revisionist by Douglas Crase

  • Brotherly Love by Daniel Hoffman

  • What Manner of Beast by Donald Finkel

  • The Sleepwalkers by Edward Hirsch

WINNER

Antarctic Traveller by Katha Pollitt

FINALISTS

  • Monoliths: poems, 1962 and 1982 by Jack Gilbert

  • Hundreds of Fireflies by Brad Leithauser

  • Visiting Rites by Phyllis Janowitz

  • Finding the Islands by W. S. Merwin

WINNER

The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill

FINALISTS

  • Erosion by Jorie Graham

  • The Kingfisher by Amy Clampitt

  • Picture Bride by Cathy Song

  • Tar by C. K. Williams

WINNER

The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds

FINALISTS

  • Ground Work: before the war by Robert Duncan

  • The Other Side of the River by Charles Wright

  • Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic by Dick Allen

  • A Wave by John Ashbery

WINNER

The Triumph of Achilles by Louise Gluck

FINALISTS

  • What the Light Was Like by Amy Clampitt

  • The Lamplit Anser by Gjertude Schnackenberg

  • The Past by Galway Kinnell

  • Late Settings by James Merrill

WINNER

Wild Gratitude by Edward Hirsch

FINALISTS

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WINNER

Flesh and Blood by C. K. Williams

FINALISTS

  • April Galleons by John Ashbery

  • Happy Hour by Alan Shapiro

  • In Other Words by May Swenson

  • The Sunset Maker by Donald Justice

WINNER

The One Day by Donald Hall

FINALISTS

  • New and Collected Poems by Richard Wilbur

  • Harp Lake by John Hollander

  • One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays by Kenneth Koch

  • Selected Poems, 1938-1988 by Thomas McGrath

WINNER

Transparent Gestures by Rodney Jones

FINALISTS

  • Earthquake Weather by August Kleinzahler

  • Human Wishes by Robert Hass

  • Pyramid of Bone by Thylias Moss

  • Water Walker by Nancy Willard

Criticism 1980-1989

WINNER

Part of Nature: modern American poets by Helen Vendler

FINALISTS

  • Abroad: British literary traveling between the Wars by Paul Fussell

  • Henry Adams by R. P. Blackmur, ed. by Veronica A. Makowsky

  • Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by Fredson Bowers

  • Nature and Culture: American landscape painting, 1825-1875 by Barbara Novak

WINNER

A Virgil Thomson Reader by Virgil Thomas

FINALISTS

  • The Geography of the Imagination: forty essays by Guy Davenport

  • Science: good, bad and bogus by Martin Gardner

  • Early Auden by Edward Mendelson

  • Boccaccio by Thomas G. Bergin

WINNER

The Second American Revolution and Other Essays, 1976-82 by Gore Vidal

FINALISTS

  • Going to the Dance by Arlene Croce

  • All That is Solid Melts Into Air: the experience of modernity by Marshall Berman

  • Agon: towards a theory of revisionism by Harold Bloom

  • Woman and the Demon by Nina Auerbach

WINNER

Hugging the Shore: essays and criticism by John Updike

FINALISTS

  • All American Music by John Rockwell

  • Art and Ardor: essays by Cynthia Ozick

  • The Art of Describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century by Svetlana Alpers

  • The Odes of John Keats by Helen Vendler

WINNER

Twentieth Century Pleasures: prose on poetry by Robert Hass

FINALISTS

  • Dawn to the West: Japanese literature in the modern era by Donald Keene

  • Hazlitt: the mind of a critic by David Bromwich

  • The Innocent Eye by Roger Shattuck

  • The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion by Leo Steinberg

WINNER

Habitations of the Word by William Gass

FINALISTS

  • Opera and Ideas: from Mozart to Strauss by Paul Robinson

  • Pierrots on the Stage of Desire: 19th century French literary artists and comic pantomime by Robert Storey

  • Hard Facts: setting and form in the American novel by Phillip Fisher

  • Occasional Prose: essays by Mary McCarthy

WINNER

FINALISTS

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WINNER

Dance Writings by Edwin Denby

FINALISTS

  • Collected Prose by Robert Lowell

  • Every Force Evolves a Form by Guy Davenport

  • Sight Lines by Arlene Croce

  • Understanding Toscanini by Joseph Horowitz

WINNER

Works and Lives: the anthropologist as author by Clifford Geertz

FINALISTS

  • The Death of Rhythm and Blues by Nelson George

  • Law and Literature: a misunderstood relation by Richard A. Posner

  • Melodious Guile: fictive pattern in poetic language by John Hollander

  • Poetry and the World by Robert Pinsky

WINNER

Not by Fact Alone: essays on the writing and reading of history by John Clive

FINALISTS

  • America's Rome by William L. Vance

  • A Choice of Inheritance: self and community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost by David Bromwich

  • Enchanted Drawings: the history of animation by Charles Solomon

  • Metaphor & Memory: essays by Cynthia Ozick