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
1978 Winners & Finalists
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)