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
1985 Winners & Finalists
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)