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
1984 Winners & Finalists
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
- Library of America