National Book Awards

Winner

The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

Finalists

Finalists not announced

Winner

The Universe and Dr. Einstein by Ralph L. Rusk

Finalists

• The Mature Mind by H. A. Overstreet

• This I Remember by Eleanor Roosevelt

• Killers of the Dream by Lillian Smith

• Lincoln Finds a General by Kenneth P. Williams

Winner

Selected Poems by William Carlos Williams

Finalists

No finalists announced

Winner

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner

Finalists

• The Trouble of One House by Brendan Gill

Winner

Herman Melville by Newton Arvin

Finalists

• No finalists announced

Winner

The Auroras of Summer by Wallace Stevens

Finalists

• No finalists announced

Winner

From Here to Eternity by James Jones

Finalists

• The Morning Watch by James Agee

• The Grass Harp by Truman Capote

• Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner

• The Strange Children by Caroline Gordon

• The Holy Sinner by Thomas Mann

Winner

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

Finalists

• The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

• Life in America, Volumes 1 and 2 by Marshall B. Davidson

• Henry James by F. W. Dupee

• Birth of a World by Waldo Frank

• George Washington by Douglas S. Freeman

• The Forgotten Language, by Erich Fromm

• The Uprooted by Oscar Handlin

• A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin

• Jefferson and the Rights of Man by Dumas Malone

• White Collar by C. Wright Mills

• The Far Side of Paradise by Arthur Mizener

• The Conduct of Life by Lewis Mumford

• Charles Evans Hughes by Merlo Pusey

• Thomas Jefferson : a Biography by Nathan Schachner

• The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams by William Carlos Williams

• Reunion and Reaction by C. Vann Woodward

Winner

Collected Poems by Marianne Moore

Finalists

• Nones by W. H. Auden

• The Spirit of the Scene by William Rose Benet

• Selected Poems by Richard Eberhart

• Selected Poems of Horace Gregory by Horace Gregory

• The Seven-League Crutches by Randall Jarrell

Winner

The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Finalists

• Many Mansions by Isabel Bolton

• Winds of Morning by H. L. Davis

• The Gathering Darkness by Thomas Gallagher

• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

• Jefferson Selleck by Carl Jonas

Winner

The Course of Empire by Bernard A. De Voto

Finalists

• A Declaration of Faith by Herbert Agar

• Ushant by Conrad Aiken

• The Big Change by Frederick L. Allen

• Let There Be Bread by Robert Brittain

• The Confident Years 1885-1915 by Van Wyck Brooks

Winner

Collected Poems 1917-1952 by Archibald MacLeish

Finalists

• Early and Late Testament by Stanley Burnshaw

• New and Selected Poems by Thomas H. Ferril

• The Suburb by the Sea by Robert Hillyer

• Cape Horn and Other Poems by Ernest Kroll

• A Mask for Janus by W. S. Merwin

Winner

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

Finalists

No finalists announced

Winner

A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton

Finalists

No finalists announced

Winner

Collected Poems by Conrad Aiken

Finalists

No finalists announced

Winner

A Fable by William Faulkner

Finalists

• The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow

• The View from Pompey's Head by Hamilton Basso

• The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb

• Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell

• The Last Hunt by Milton Lott

• Lord Grizzly by Frederick Manfred

• The Bad Seed by William March

• The Huge Season by Wright Morris

• The Courts of Memory by Frank Rooney

• Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck

Winner

The Measure of Man by Joseph Wood Krutch

Finalists

• Scenes and Portraits by Van Wyck Brooks

• The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown

• But We Were Born Free by Elmer Davis

• The Manner is Ordinary by John LaFarge

• The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill by Hermann Hagedorn

• Great River : The Rio Grande in North American HIstory by Paul Horgan

• Bent's Fort by David Lavender

• Abraham Lincoln by Carl Sandburg

• Beyond the Hundredth Meridian by Wallace Stegner

• The Test of Freedom by Norman Thomas

• The Second Tree from the Corner by E. B. White

Winner

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens

Finalists

• Poems : A Selection by Léonie Adams

• Collected Poems, 1923-1953 by Louise Bogan

• Hungerfield and Other Poems by Robinson Jeffers

• Songs for Eve by Archibald MacLeish

• The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley by Phyllis McGinley

• Verse Diary of a Psychiatrist by Merrill Moore

• A Character Invented by LeRoy Smith

• Another Animal (published as part of "Poets of Today") by May Swenson

• The Desert Music and Other Poems by William Carlos WIlliams by William Carlos Williams

• Selected Poems by Marya Zaturenska

• Poems, 1923-1954 by e. e. cummings

Winner

Ten North Frederick by John O'Hara

Finalists

• The Spider's House by Paul Bowles

• The Black Prince by Shirley Ann Grau

• Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor

• A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

• Faithful Are the Wounds by May Sarton

• Band of Angels by Robert Penn Warren

• The Bride of Innisfallen by Eudora Welty

• Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk

Winner

An American in Italy by Herbert Kubly

Finalists

• The Solitary Singer by Gay Wilson Allen

• Government by Investigation by Alan Barth

• The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson

• The Land They Fought For by Clifford Dowdey

• Inside Africa by John Gunther

• The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter

• Part of Our Time by Murray Kempton

• A Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

• They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer

• Notre-Dame of Paris : the Biography of a Cathedral by Allan Temko

• Year of Decisions by Harry S. Truman

• The Scrolls from the Dead Sea by Edmund Wilson

Winner

The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden

Finalists

• Poems, North and South, by Elizabeth Bishop

• As If, by John Ciardi

• Birthdays from the Ocean by Isabella Gardner

• Exiles and Marriages, by Donald Hall

• Selected Poems by Randall Jarrell

• The Diamond Cutter and Other Poems by Adrienne Rich

• Journey to Love by William Carlos Williams

Winner

The Field of Vision by Wright Morris

Finalists

• A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren

• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

• Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

• Greenwillow by B J. Chute

• These Thousand Hills by A. B. Guthrie

• A Single Pebble by John Hersey

• Generations of Men by John Hunt

• The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor

• The Presence of Grace by J. F. Powers

• The Voice at the Back Door by Elizabeth Spencer

• Further Fables for Our Time by James Thurber

Winner

Russia Leaves the War by George F. Kennan

Finalists

• John Quincy Adams and the Union by Samuel F. Bemis

• Roosevelt : the Lion and the Fox by James MacGregor Burns

• This Hallowed Ground by Bruce Catton

• Old Bullion Benton by William Chambers

• Guide to Straight Thinking by Stuart Chase

• The Atomic Quest by Arthur H. Compton

• Franklin D. Roosevelt : the Triumph by Frank Freidel

• The Nun's Story by Katherine Hulme

• Richard the Third by Paul Murray Kendall

• Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy

• The Revolt of the Moderates by Samuel Lubell

• The Raven and the Whale by Perry Miller

• Transformations of Man by Lewis Mumford

• Autumn Across America by Edwin Way Teale

• Segregation by Robert Penn Warren

• The Organization of Man by William Whyte, Jr.

Winner

Things of This World by Richard Wilbur

Finalists

• The Form of Loss by Edgar Bowers

• This Tilting Dust by Leah Bodine Drake

• The Greenhouse in the Garden by Charles Edward Eaton

• New and Selected Poems by Kenneth Fearing

• In the Rose of Time by Robert Fitzgerald

• Villa Narcisse by Katherine Hoskins

• Green Armor on Green Ground by Rolfe Humphries

• Poems of Today, III by Joseph Langland

• The Unicorn by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

• Green with Beasts by W. S. Merwin

• Like a Bulwark by Marianne Moore

• Section : Rock Drill by Ezra Pound

• In Defense of the Earth by Kenneth Rexroth

• Poems Old and New by John Hall Wheelock

Winner

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

Finalists

• A Death in the Family by James Agee

• By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens

• Something About a Soldier by Mark Harris

• The Velvet Horn by Andrew Lytle

• The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

• Love Among the Cannibals by Wright Morris

• Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

• The Return of Lady Brace by Nancy Wilson Ross

• The Birth of a Grandfather by May Sarton

Winner

The Lion and the Throne by Catherine Drinker Bowen

Finalists

• Mr. Baruch by Margaret Coit

• The Reformation by Will Durant

• Alexander Hamilton in the American Tradition by Louis Hacker

• Poets in a Landscape by Gilbert Highet

• Justice Holmes : the Shaping Years, 1841-1870 by Mark deWolfe Howe

• Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy by Mary McCarthy

• A Proposal : Key to an Effective Foreign Policy by Max F. Milliken and W. W. Rostow

• The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard

• The Twentieth Maine by John Pullen

• As France Goes by David Schoebrun

• Bridge to the Sun by Gwen Terasaki

• The Citadel by William S. White

Winner

Promises : Poems, 1954-1956 by Robert Penn Warren

Finalists

• Time Without Number by Daniel Berrigan

• Letter from a Distant Land by Phillip Booth

• The Arctic Tern by Edwin G. Burrows

• The Selected Poems of H. D. by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

• Great Praises by Richard Eberhart

• Poems by Richmond Lattimore

• Swimmer in the Air by Howard Moss

• In Time Like Air by May Sarton

• Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana by Eli Siegel

• Poems : 1947-1957 by William Jay Smith

• Opus Posthumous by Wallace Stevens

• The Green Wall by James Wright

Winner

The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud

Finalists

• The Ginger Man by J. P Donleavy

• Home from the Hill by William Humphrey

• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

• From the Terrace by John O'Hara

• The Lost Country by J. R. Salamanca

• The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton

• Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver

Winner

Mistress to an Age : A Life of Madame De Stael by J. Christopher Herold

Finalists

• The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

• Private by Lester Atwell

• The Americans : the Colonial Experience by Daniel J. Boorstin

• The Wall Between by Anne Braden

• Naked to Mine Enemies by Charles Ferguson

• The Civil War Volume 1 by Shelby Foote

• The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

• Only in America by Harry Golden

• Russia, the Atom and the West by George F. Kennan

• Marlborough's Duchess by Louis Kronenberger

• A Case HIstory of Hope by Flora Lewis

• Journey to the Beginning by Edgar Snow

Winner

Words for the Wind by Theodore Roethke

Finalists

• I Marry You by John Ciardi

• J. B. by Archibald MacLeish

• Mirrors and Windows by Howard Nemerove

• Collected Poems by Theodore Roethke

• Poems of a Jew by Karl Shapiro

• A Cage of Spines by May Swenson

• Paterson, Book IV by William Carlos Williams

• Selected Poems 1923-1958 by e. e. cummings