National Book Awards

Winner

An Unfinished Woman : a Memoir by Lillian Hellman

Finalists

• Alone with America : Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 by Richard Howard

• Dr. Bowdler's Legacy : a History of Expurgated Books in England and America by Noel Perrin

• Voyager : a Life of Hart Crane by John Unterecker

• Reflections Upon a SInking Ship by Gore Vidal

Winner

A Day of Pleasure : Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Finalists

• Where the Lilies Bloom by Bill and Vera Cleaver

• Pop Corn and Ma Goodness by Edna Mitchell Preston

• Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig

• The Young United States, 1783-1830 by Edwin Tunis

Winner

Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Finalists

• Fat City by Leonard Gardner

• Going Places by Leonard MIchaels

• The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford

Winner

The Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop

Finalists

• False Gods, Real Men by Daniel Berrigan

• The Secret Meaning of Things by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

• Notebook, 1967-1968, by Robert Lowell

• On Bear's Head by Philip Whalen

Winner

The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian by Lloyd Alexander

Finalists

• Grover by Bill & Vera Cleaver

• Blowfish Live in the Sea by Paula Fox

• Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel

• The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White

Winner

Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

Finalists

• Deliverance by James Dickey

• The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard

• Bech : a Book by John Updike

• Losing Battles by Eudora Welty

Winner

Roosevelt : the Soldier of Freedom by James MacGregor Burns

Finalists

• Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man by David Donald

• Against the Evidence : the Becker-Rosenthal Affair by Andy Logan

• Jefferson the President : First Term, 1801-1805 by Dumas Malone

• The Last of the Giants by C. L. Sulzberger

Winner

To See, To Take by Mona Van Duyn

Finalists

• Elegiac Feelings American by Gregory Corso

• The Carrier of Ladders by W. S. Merwin

• Iconographs by May Swenson

Winner

The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or The Hithering Thithering Djinn by Donald Barthelme

Finalists

• The Art and Industry of Sandcastles by Jan Adkins

• Wild in the World by John Donovan

• The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin

• The Planet of Junior Brown by Virginia Hamilton

• His Own Where by June Jordan

• Hildilid's Night by Cheli Duran Ryan & Arnold Lobel

• The Bear's House by Marilyn Sachs

• Amos & Boris by William Steig

• Father Fox's Pennyrhymes by Clyde Watson

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Planet of Junior Brown by Virginia Hamilton

Hildilid's Night by Cheli Duran Ryan & Arnold Lobel

The Bears' House by Marilyn Sachs

Amos & Boris by William Steig

Winner

The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor

Finalists

• Lion Country by Frederick Buechner

• The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow

• The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin

• Faragan's Retreat by Tom McHale

• Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates

• The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories by Cynthia Ozick

• Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy

• A Garden of Sand by Earl Thompson

• Rabbit Redux by John Updike

The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow

Winner

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara by Frank O'Hara

Finalists

• Briefings by A. R. Ammons

• Death & Friends by Jon Anderson

• Spring Shade : Poems, 1931-1970 by Robert Fitzgerald

• Words in the Mourning Time by Robert Hayden

• The Night Mirror by John Hollander

• The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell

• A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel by David Shapiro

• The Swimmers and Other Selected Poems by Allen Tate

• Collected Poems by James Wright

Winner

The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin

Finalists

• The House of Wings by Betsy Byars

• Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George

• Children of Vietnam by Betty Jean Lifton

• The Impossible People by Georgess McHargue

• The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

• Dominic by William Steig

• Trolls by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire

Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George

The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Dominic, by William Steig

Winners

• Augustus by John Williams

• Chimera by John Barth

Finalists

• The Late Great Creature by Brock Brower

• Hermaphrodeity by Alan Friedman

• Geronimo Rex by Barry Hannah

• The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins

• The Prince by R. M. Koster

• Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov

• Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

• The Confessions of a Child of the Century by Thomas Rogers

• Enemies, a Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer

• The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

Winner

Collected Poems, 1951-1971 by A. R. Ammons

Finalists

• Epistle to a Godson and Other Poems by W. H. Auden

• Delusions, Etc. by John Berryman

• Fields of Grace by Richard Eberhart

• Once for the Last Bandit by Samuel Hazo

• Town & Country Matters by John Hollander

• Footprints by Denise Levertov

• The Human Season by Archibald MacLeish

• Braving the Elements by James Merrill

• A Book of Change by Frederick Morgan

• Conjure by Ishmael Reed

• Adventures of the Letter I by Louis Simpson

Winner

Deeper Into Movies by Pauline Kael

Finalists

• The Unwritten War by Daniel Aaron

• Forewords and Afterwords by W. H. Auden

• Mandelstam by Clarence Brown

• Golden Codgers by Richard Ellman

• A Decade of Music by B. H. Haggin

• Pentimento by Lillian Hellman

• Walking the Dead Diamond River by Edward Hoagland

• Elie Nadelman Drawings by Lincoln Kirstein

• Explaining Music by Leonard B. Mayer

Pentimento by Lilliam Hellman

Winner

The Court of the Stone Children by Eleanor Cameron

Finalists

• A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich by Alice Childress

• The Treasure is the Rose by Julia Cunningham

• Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene

• Guests in the Promised Land by Kristin Hunter

• A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver by E. L. Konigsburg

• A Figure of Speech by Norma Fox Mazer

• Poor Richard in France by F. N. Monjo

• Duffy and the Devil by Harve and Margot Zemach

Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene

Duffy and the Devil by Harve Zemach

Winner

A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Finalists

• Beasts of the Southern Wild & Other Stories by Doris Betts

• The World of Apples by John Cheever

• Apostles of Light by Ellen Douglas

• Searches and Seizures by Stanley Elkin

• Nickel Mountain by John Gardner

• Black Conceit by John Leonard

• Ninety-Two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane

• People Will Always Be Kind by Wilfrid Sheed

• Burr by Gore Vidal

• State of Grace by Joy WIlliams

Ninety-Two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane

Burr by Gore Vidal

Winner

Diving into the Wreck : Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich

Finalists

• From Snow and Rock, from Chaos by Hayden Carruth

• Points for a Compass Rose by Evan S. Connell, Jr.

• Collecting the Animals by Peter Everwine

• The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir by Richard Hugo

• Departures by Donald Justice

• Armed love by Eleanor Lerman

• From a Land Where Other People Live by Audre Lorde

• Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems by Alice Walker

• Hard Freight by Charlse Wright

Winner

The Life of Emily Dickinson by Richard B. Sewall

Finalists

• Patrick Henry by Richard Beeman

• Carrying the Fire : an Astronaut's Journey by Michael Collins

• Edward Weston : His Life by Ben Maddow

• Charmed Circle : Gertrude Stein & Company by James R. Mellow

• Your Isadora by Francis Steegmuller

• The Uneasy Chair : a Biography of Bernard De Voto by Wallace Stegner

• Bix : Man and Legend by Richard M. Sudhalter and Philip R. Evans

• Gesualdo : the Man and His Music by Glenn Watkins

• Friar Thomas D'Aquino by James A. Weisheipl

Winner

M. C. Higgins, the Great by Virginia Hamilton

Finalists

• The Devil's Storybook by Natalie Babbitt

• Doctor in the Zoo by Bruce Buchenholz

• I Tell a Lie Every So Often by Bruce Clements

• My Brother Sam is Dead by Christopher Collier & James Lincoln Collier

• Joi Bangla : the Children of Bangladesh by Jason Laure & Ettagale Laure

• Remember the Days : a Short HIstory of the Jewish American by Milton Meltzer

• World of Our Fathers : the Jews of Eastern Europe by Milton Meltzer

• Wings by Adrienne Richard

• The Edge of Next Year by Mary Stoltz

• The Girl Who Cried Flowers and Other Tales by Jane Yolen

My Brother Sam is Dead by Christopher Collier & James Lincoln Collier

Winner

The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams

Finalists

• Guilty Pleasures by Donald Barthelme

• The Odd Woman by Gail Godwin

• Something Happened by Joseph Heller

• Sula by Toni Morrison

• Look at the Harlequins by Vladimir Nabokov

• Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley

• My Life as a Man by Philip Roth

• The Death of the Detective by Mark Smith

Sula by Toni Morrison

Winner

Presentation Piece by Marilyn Hacker

Finalists

• Sphere : the Form of a Motion by A. R. Ammons

• After Our War by John Balaban

• Jan 31 by Albert Goldbarth

• Two-Part Inventions by Richard Howard

• The Shade Seller by Josephine Jacobsen

• Threats Instead of Trees by Michael Ryan

• Granite Lady by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

• Sleeping in the Woods by David Wagoner

• The Mother's Breast & the Father's House by Reed Whittemore

Winner

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

Finalists

• Nijinsky Dancing by Lincoln Kirstein

• The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination by Lawrence L. Langer

• Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition by Robert Rosenblum

• The Female Imagination by Patricia Meyer Spacks

• Michelangelo's Last Paintings by Leo Steinberg

Winner

Bert Breen's Barn by Walter D. Edmonds

Finalists

• To the Green Mountains, by Eleanor Cameron

• As I Was Crossing Boston Common by Norma Faber

• Of Love and Death and Other Journeys by Isabelle Holland

• The Star in the Pail by David McCord

• El Bronx Remembered by Nicolasa Mohr

• Ludell by Brenda WIlkinson

Winner

JR by William Gaddis

Finalists

• Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

• The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher by Hortense Calisher

• Other People's Lives by Johanna Kaplan

• Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories by Vladimir Nabokov

• Beyond the Bedroom Wall by Larry Woiwode

Winner

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery

Finalists

• What Thou Lovest Well, Remains American by Richard Hugo

• D. C. Images by P. J. Laska

• The Life Beside This One by John N. Morris

• Returning Your Call by Leonard Nathan

• Collected Poems by George Oppen

• How I Got Ovah by Carolyn M. Rodgers

• The Peacock Poems by Sherley Anne WIlliams

Winner

The Master Puppeteer by Katherine Paterson

Finalists

• Never to Forget : the Jews of the Holocaust by Milton Meltzer

• Ox Under Pressure by John Ney

• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor

• Tunes for a Small Harmonica by Barbara Wersba

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by MIldred D. Taylor

Winner

The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

Finalists

• Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver

• Orsinian Tales : a Collection of Short Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin

• The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris

• A Fine Romance by Cynthia Propper Seton

Winner

World of Our Fathers : the Journey of the Eastern European Jews to America by Irving Howe

Finalists

• Democratic Promise : the Populist Movement in America by Lawrence Goodwyn

• Woman's Body, Woman's Right : Birth Control in America by Linda Gordon

• Simple Justice : the History of Brown V. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality by Richard Kluger

Winner

Master Tung's Western Chamber Romance by Li-Li Chen

Finalists

• Aeschylus's The Orestia translated by Robert Fagles

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch translated by Gregory Rabassa

• Dante's The Divine Comedy, Paradiso: Vols, I & II translated by Charles Singleton

• Antonin Artaud : Selected Writings translated by Helen Weaver

Winner

Samuel Johnson : a Biography by W. Jackson Bate

Finalists

• Delmore Schwartz : the Life of an American Poet by James Atlas

• Brother to a Dragonfly by Will D. Campbell

• A Dual Autobiography by Will & Ariel Durant

• Black Jack : the Life and Times of John L. Pershing by Frank E. Vandiver

Winner

Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle

Finalists

• The Public Burning by Robert Coover

• Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson

• Union Dues by John  Sayles

• Madder Music by Peter De Vries

Winner

The Path Between the Seas : the Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914 by David McCullough

Finalists

• The Empire of Reason by Henry Steele Commager

• Conflict and Crisis : the Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945-1948

• A Species of Eternity by Joseph Kastner

• Gold and Iron : Bismarck, Bleichrõder and the Building of the German Empire by Fritz Stern

Winner

The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov by Howard Nemerov

Finalists

• Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See by Marvin Bell

• Images of Kin by Michael S. Harper

• A Private Signal by Barbara Howes

• Charon's Cosmology by Charles Simic

Winner

Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Finalists

• Remembering Poets by Donald Hall

• American Caesar : Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964

• Prodigal Father : the Life of John Butler Yeats by William M. Murphy

• Woman of Letters : a Life of Virginia Woolf by Phyllis Rose

Winner

The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katerine Paterson

Finalists

• The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha by Lloyd Alexander

• Queen of Hearts by Vera & Bill Cleaver

• Humbug Mountain by Sid Fleischman

• The Little Swineherd and Other Tales by Paula Fox

Winner

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

Finalists

• Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man by David Donald

• Against the Evidence : the Becker-Rosenthal Affair by Andy Logan

• Jefferson the President : First Term, 1801-1805 by Dumas Malone

• The Last of the Giants by C. L. Sulzberger

Winner

Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien

Finalists

• The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever

• The World According to Garp by John Irving

• Lying Low by Diane Johnson

• The Family by David Plante