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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
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)
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