Each year, the National Book Critics Circle presents awards for the finest books published in English in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography, Poetry, and Criticism.
The National Book Critics Circle Award
1976 Winners & Finalists
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)