The National Book Critics Circle Award

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)