Walker Percy

Walker Percy OblSB
Percy in 1987
Born	(1916-05-28)May 28, 1916 Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.
Died	May 10, 1990(1990-05-10) (aged 73) Covington, Louisiana, U.S.
Occupation	Writer
Alma mater	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (BA) Columbia University (MD)
Period	1961–1990
Genre	Philosophical novelist, memoir, essays
Literary movement	Southern Gothic
Notable works	The Moviegoer
Spouse	Mary Bernice Townsend ​ ​ (m. 1946)​
Children	2
Relatives	William Alexander Percy

Walker Percy, OblSB (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.

Trained as a physician at Columbia University, Percy decided to become a writer after a bout of tuberculosis. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age." His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith. He had a lifelong friendship with author and historian Shelby Foote and spent much of his life in Covington, Louisiana, where he died of prostate cancer in 1990.

Early life and education

Percy was born on May 28, 1916, in Birmingham, Alabama, the first of three boys to LeRoy Pratt Percy and Martha Susan Phinizy. His father's Mississippi Protestant family included his great-uncle LeRoy Percy, a US senator, and LeRoy Pope Walker, a pro-slavery secessionist in Antebellum America and the first Confederate States Secretary of War during the American Civil War. In February 1917, Percy's grandfather committed suicide.

In 1929, when Percy was 13, his father committed suicide. His mother took the family to live at her own mother's home in Athens, Georgia. Two years later, Percy's mother died in a suspected suicide when she drove a car off a country bridge and into Deer Creek near Leland, Mississippi, where they were visiting. Percy regarded this death as another suicide. Walker and his two younger brothers, LeRoy (Roy) and Phinizy (Phin), were taken in by their first cousin once removed, William Alexander Percy, a bachelor lawyer and poet living in Greenville, Mississippi.

Percy was raised as an agnostic, but he was nominally affiliated with a theologically liberal Presbyterian church. William Percy introduced him to many writers and poets.

Percy attended Greenville High School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in chemistry and joined the Xi chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. He wrote essays and book reviews for the school's Carolina Magazine. He graduated with a B.A. in 1937.

Friendship with Shelby Foote

After moving to Greenville, Mississippi, in 1930, Shelby Foote became Percy's lifelong best friend. As young men, Percy and Foote decided to visit William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi. However, when they arrived at his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to speak. Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation.

External videos
Interview with Foote on The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, December 8, 1996, C-SPAN

Percy and Foote were classmates at both Greenville High School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although Foote was not permitted to join Percy's fraternity because of his partly Jewish heritage, he and Percy stayed close friends during their two overlapping years. They went on dates together, made regular trips to nearby Durham, North Carolina, to drink and socialize, and journeyed to New York City during one of their semester breaks. When Percy graduated in 1937, Foote dropped out and returned to Greenville.

In the late 1940s, Percy and Foote began a correspondence that lasted until Percy's death in 1990. A collection of their correspondence was published in 1996.

Medical training and tuberculosis

Lower Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, where Percy spent time recovering from tuberculosis

Percy received an M.D. from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City in 1941, intending to become a psychiatrist. There, he spent five days a week in psychoanalysis with Janet Rioch, to whom he had been referred by Harry Stack Sullivan, a friend of Uncle Will. After three years, Walker decided to quit the psychoanalysis and later reflected on his treatment as inconclusive. Percy became an intern at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan in 1942 but contracted tuberculosis the same year while he was performing an autopsy at Bellevue. At the time, there was no known treatment for the disease other than rest. While he had only a "minimal lesion" that caused him little pain, he was forced to abandon his medical career and to leave the city. Percy spent several years recuperating at the Trudeau Sanitorium in Saranac Lake, in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. He spent his time sleeping, reading, and listening to his radio to hear updates on World War II. He was envious of his brothers, who were both enlisted in the war and fighting overseas. During this period, Percy used Trudeau's Mellon Library, which held over 7,000 titles. He read the works of Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard as well as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann. He began to question the ability of science to explain the basic mysteries of human existence. He began to rise daily at dawn to attend Mass.

In August 1944, Percy was pronounced healthy enough to leave Trudeau and was discharged. He traveled to New York City to see Huger Jervey, dean of Columbia Law School and a friend of Percy. He then lived for two months in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with his brother Phin, who was on leave from the Navy. In the spring of 1945, Percy returned to Columbia as an instructor of pathology and took up residence with Huger Jervey. In May, an X-ray revealed a resurgence of the bacillus. Percy consequently traveled to Wallingford, Connecticut, to stay at Gaylord Farm Sanatorium.

Years later, Percy reflected on his illness with more fondness than he had then felt at the time: "I was the happiest man ever to contract tuberculosis, because it enabled me to get out of Bellevue and quit medicine."

Career

Early career

In 1935, during the winter term of Percy's sophomore year at Chapel Hill, he contributed four pieces to The Carolina Magazine. According to scholars such as Jay Tolson, Percy proved his knowledge and interest in the good and the bad that accompany contemporary culture with his first contributions. Percy's personal experiences at Chapel Hill are portrayed in his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), through the protagonist Binx Bolling. During the years that Percy spent in his fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, he "became known for his dry wit," which is how Bolling is described by his fraternity brothers in The Moviegoer.

Percy had begun in 1947 or 1948 to write a novel called The Charterhouse, which was not published and Percy later destroyed. He worked on a second novel, The Gramercy Winner, which also was never published.

Percy's literary career as a Catholic writer began in 1956 with an essay about race in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. The essay "Stoicism in the South" condemned Southern segregation and demanded a larger role for Christian thought in Southern life.

Later career

After many years of writing and rewriting in collaboration with editor Stanley Kauffmann, Percy published his first novel, The Moviegoer, in 1961. Percy later wrote of the novel that it was the story of "a young man who had all the advantages of a cultivated old-line southern family: a feel for science and art, a liking for girls, sports cars, and the ordinary things of the culture, but who nevertheless feels himself quite alienated from both worlds, the old South and the new America."

Later works included The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), Lancelot (1977), The Second Coming (1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome in 1987. Percy's personal life and family legends provided inspiration and played a part in his writing. The Thanatos Syndrome features a story about one of Percy's ancestors that was taken from a family chronicle written by Percy's uncle, Will Percy. Percy's vision for the plot of The Second Coming came to him after an old fraternity brother visited him in the 1970s. He told Percy the story of his life where he is burned out and does not know what to do next. The trend of Percy's personal life influencing his writing seemingly held true throughout his literary career, beginning with his first novel. Percy also published a number of nonfiction works exploring his interests in semiotics and existentialism, his most popular work being Lost in the Cosmos.

In 1975, Percy published a collection of essays, The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. Percy attempted to forge a connection between the idea of Judeo-Christian ethics and rationalized science and behavioralism. According to scholars such as Anne Berthoff and Linda Whitney Hobson, Percy presented a new way of viewing the struggles of the common man by his specific use of anecdotes and language.

Percy taught and mentored younger writers. While teaching at Loyola University of New Orleans, he was instrumental in getting John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces published in 1980. That was more than a decade after Toole committed suicide, despondent about being unable to get recognition for his book. Set in New Orleans, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which was posthumously awarded to Toole.

In 1987, Percy, along with 21 other noted authors, met in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to create the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Personal life

Percy married Mary Bernice Townsend, a medical technician, on November 7, 1946. Both studied Catholicism and were received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1947. Fearing that Percy was sterile, the married couple adopted a first daughter, Mary Pratt, but later conceived a second daughter, Ann, who became deaf at an early age. The family settled in Covington, Louisiana, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. Percy's wife and one of their daughters later had a bookstore, where the writer often worked in an office on the second floor.

Views

Percy was strongly anti-abortion. In 1981, he authored a New York Times opinion article, in which he called abortion a "banal atrocity". On another occasion, Percy once told an interviewer:

If I had anything to say to the liberals, it is that I agree with them on almost everything: their political and social causes, and the ACLU, God knows, the right to freedom of speech, to help the homeless, the poor, the minorities, God knows the blacks, the third world—their hearts are in the right place. It’s actually a mystery, a bafflement to me, how they cannot see the paradox of being in favor of these good things and yet not batting an eyelash when it comes to destroying unborn life.

Percy's final novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, condemns eugenics, senicide, and abortion.

Illness and death

Percy underwent an operation for prostate cancer on March 10, 1988, but it had already metastasized to surrounding tissue and lymph nodes. In July 1989, he volunteered to allow his doctors at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota, to use experimental medicines. Percy enrolled in a pilot study to test the effects of the drugs interferon and fluorouracil in cancer patients. In his correspondence with Foote, Percy expressed frustration over the frequent travel and hospital stays: "Hospitals are no place for anyone, let alone a sick man." Although the side effects of the experimental treatment were debilitating, Percy had a revelation when he saw children with cancer waiting in the lounges. He decided to continue the treatment at Mayo as long as he could so that the results of his treatment might be of value to others.

He died of prostate cancer at his home in Covington in 1990, eighteen days before his 74th birthday. He is buried on the grounds of St. Joseph Benedictine Abbey, in St. Benedict, Louisiana. He had become a secular oblate of the Abbey's monastic community, making his final oblation on February 16, 1990, less than three months before his death.

Legacy and honors

Influence

Percy's work, which often features protagonists facing displacement, influenced other Southern authors. According to scholar Farrell O'Gorman, Percy's vision helped bring a fundamental change in southern literature where authors began to use characters concerned with "a sense of estrangement". His writing serves as an example for contemporary southern writers who attempt to combine elements of history, religion, science, and the modern world. Scholars such as Jay Tolson state that Percy's frequent use of characters facing spiritual loneliness in the modern world helped introduce different ways of writing in the south post-war.

Awards and honors

In 1962, Percy was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction for his first novel, The Moviegoer.

In 1985, Percy was awarded the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates.

In 1989, the University of Notre Dame awarded Percy its Laetare Medal, which is bestowed annually to a Catholic "whose genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the Church, and enriched the heritage of humanity".

Also in 1989, the National Endowment for the Humanities chose him as the winner for the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. He read his essay, "The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind".

Loyola University New Orleans has multiple archival and manuscript collections related to Percy's life and work.

In 2019, a Mississippi Writers Trail historical marker was installed in Greenville, Mississippi, to honor Percy's literary contributions.

Works

Novels

• The Moviegoer. New York: Knopf, 1961; reprinted Avon, 1980 — winner of the National Book Award
• The Last Gentleman. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1966; reprinted Avon, 1978.
• Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1971; reprinted Avon, 1978.
• Lancelot. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977.
• The Second Coming. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1980.
• The Thanatos Syndrome. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987.

Nonfiction

Several of the following texts are mere pamphlets, reprinted in Signposts in a Strange Land (ed. Samway).

• The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1975.
• Going Back to Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia, 1978 (also in Signposts, 1991.)
• Questions They Never Asked Me. Northridge, California: Lord John Press, 1979 (also in Signposts, 1991.)
• Bourbon. Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Palaemon Press, 1982 (also in Signposts, 1991.)
• Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1983.
• How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic. Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1984 (also in Signposts, 1991.)
• The City of the Dead. Northridge, California: Lord John Press, 1985 (also in Signposts, 1991.)
• Conversations with Walker Percy. Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985.
• Diagnosing the Modern Malaise. New Orleans: Faust, 1985. (Also in Signposts, 1991.)
• Novel-Writing in an Apocalyptic Time. New Orleans: Faust Publishing Company, 1986. (Also in Signposts, 1991.)
• State of the Novel: Dying Art or New Science. New Orleans: Faust Publishing Company, 1988. (Also in Signposts, 1991.)
• Signposts in a Strange Land. Samway, Patrick, ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1991.
• More Conversations with Walker Percy. Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.
• A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy. Samway, Patrick, ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
• The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. Tolson, Jay, ed. New York: Center for Documentary Studies, 1996.
• Symbol and Existence: A Study in Meaning: Explorations of Human Nature by Walker Percy. Edited by Ketner, Kenneth Laine, Karey Lea Perkins, Rhonda Reneé McDonell, Scott Ross Cunningham. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2019. Percy's previously unpublished book on his working theory.

See also

• William Alexander Percy

References

Works cited

• Elie, Paul (2003). The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-25680-7.
• Foote, Shelby; Percy, Walker (1998). Tolson, Jay (ed.). The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-31768-8.
• Wilson, Jessica Hooten (2018). Reading Walker Percy's Novels. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-6878-3.
• Wyatt-Brown, Bertram (1996). The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-510982-5.

Further reading

• Coles, Robert (1979). Walker Percy: An American Search. Little, Brown & Co.
• Desmond, John F. (2019). Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide. Catholic University of America Press.
• Dupuy, Edward J. (1996). Autobiography in Walker Percy: Repetition, Recovery and Redemption. Louisiana State University Press.
• Harwell, David Horace (2006). Walker Percy Remembered: A Portrait in the Words of Those Who Knew Him. University of North Carolina Press.
• Hughes, Leonard (2021). "The Great Gatsby's Southern Exposure: Walker Percy's Debt to F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Moviegoer". The Mississippi Quarterly. 73 (4): 479–505. doi:10.1353/mss.2021.0002. S2CID 245191641.
• Mooneyham, Laura (July 1993). "The origin of consciousness, gains and losses: Walker Percy vs Julian Jaynes". Language and Communication. 13 (3): 169–182. doi:10.1016/0271-5309(93)90024-H. ISSN 0271-5309.  (Reprinted in Kuijsten, M. (ed.), Gods, Voices and the Bicameral Mind. Julian Jaynes Society, 2016, pp. 175-197.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• Marsh, Leslie (2018). Walker Percy, Philosopher. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Smith, Brian A. (2017). Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer. Lexington Books.
• Tillman, Jane G. (2016). "The intergenerational transmission of suicide: Moral injury and the mysterious object in the work of Walker Percy". Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 64 (3): 541–567. doi:10.1177/0003065116653362. PMID 27273888. S2CID 4790667.
• Wood, Ralph C. (1988). The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists. University of Notre Dame Press.
• Wyatt-Brown, Bertram (1994). The Literary Percys: Family History, Gender & the Southern Imagination. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press.
• Swirski, Peter (2011). "We Better Kill the Instinct to Kill Before It Kills Us or Violence, Mind Control, and Walker Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome". American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York: Routledge.
• Wilson, Franklin Arthur (2016). "Percy Following Faulkner: A Different Path?". Renascence. 68 (4): 294–310. doi:10.5840/renascence201668420.

External links

• Inventory of the Walker Percy Papers, circa 1910–1992, in the Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill
• Bio, The Fellowship of Southern Writers
• The Walker Percy Project: An Internet Literary Center
• Walker Percy: From Pen to Print, a 2002 exhibit at the Rare Book Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill.
• Abádi-Nagy, Zoltán (Summer 1987). "Walker Percy, The Art of Fiction". The Paris Review. Summer 1987 (97).
• Walker Percy's library, LibraryThing
• Walker Percy: A Documentary Archived 2016-09-27 at the Wayback Machine
• The Maple Street Book Shop Walker Percy collection Archived 2023-04-08 at the Wayback Machine at The Historic New Orleans Collection

National Book Award for Fiction
Awarded for	Outstanding literary work by U.S. citizens.
Location	New York City
First awarded	1935
Website	National Book Foundation

The National Book Award for Fiction is one of five annual National Book Awards, which recognize outstanding literary work by United States citizens. Since 1987, the awards have been administered and presented by the National Book Foundation, but they are awards "by writers to writers." The panelists are five "writers who are known to be doing great work in their genre or field."

General fiction was one of four categories when the awards were re-established in 1950. For several years beginning 1980, prior to the Foundation, there were multiple fiction categories: hardcover, paperback, first novel or first work of fiction; from 1981 to 1983 hardcover and paperback children's fiction; and only in 1980 five awards to mystery fiction, science fiction, and western fiction. When the Foundation celebrated the 60th postwar awards in 2009, all but three of the 77 previous winners in fiction categories were in print. The 77 included all eight 1980 winners but excluded the 1981 to 1983 children's fiction winners.

The award recognizes one book written by a U.S. citizen and published in the U.S. from December 1 to November 30. The National Book Foundation accepts nominations from publishers until June 15, requires mailing nominated books to the panelists by August 1, and announces five finalists in October. The winner is announced on the day of the final ceremony in November. The award is $10,000 and a bronze sculpture; other finalists get $1,000, a medal, and a citation written by the panel.

Authors who have won the award more than once include William Faulkner, John Updike, William Gaddis, Jesmyn Ward, and Philip Roth, each having won on two occasions along with numerous other nominations. Saul Bellow won the award in three decades (1954, 1965, 1971) and is the only author to have won the National Book Award for Fiction three times.

National Book Awards for Fiction

From 1935 to 1941, there were six annual awards for general fiction and the "Bookseller Discovery" or "Most Original Book" was sometimes a novel. From 1980 to 1985, there were six annual awards to first novels or first works of fiction. In 1980 there were five awards to mystery, western, or science fiction. There have been many awards to fiction in the Children's or Young People's categories.

Honorees, general fiction

This list covers only the post-war awards (pre-war awards follow) to general fiction for adult readers: one annual winner from 1950 except two undifferentiated winners 1973 to 1975, dual hardcover and paperback winners 1980 to 1983.

For each award, the winner is listed first followed by the finalists. Unless otherwise noted, the year represents the year the award was given for books published in the prior year. Thus, the award year 1950 is for books published in 1949.

1950s

National Book Award for Fiction winners and finalists, 1950-1959

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1950	Nelson Algren	The Man with the Golden Arm	Winner
	No runners up were recognized. There were five honorable mentions in the non-fiction category only.
1951	William Faulkner	Collected Stories of William Faulkner	Winner
	No runners up were recognized.
1952	James Jones	From Here to Eternity	Winner
	James Agee	The Morning Watch	Finalist
	Truman Capote	The Grass Harp	Finalist
	William Faulkner	Requiem for a Nun	Finalist
	Caroline Gordon	The Strange Children	Finalist
	Thomas Mann	The Holy Sinner	Finalist
	John P. Marquand	Melville Goodwin USA	Finalist
	J. D. Salinger	The Catcher in the Rye	Finalist
	William Styron	Lie Down in Darkness	Finalist
	Jessamyn West	The Witch Diggers	Finalist
	Herman Wouk	The Caine Mutiny	Finalist
1953	Ralph Ellison	Invisible Man	Winner
	Isabel Bolton	Many Mansions	Finalist
	H. L. Davis	Winds of Morning	Finalist
	Thomas Gallagher	The Gathering Darkness	Finalist
	Ernest Hemingway	The Old Man and the Sea	Finalist
	Carl Jonas	Jefferson Selleck	Finalist
	Peter Martin	The Landsman	Finalist
	May Sarton	A Shower of Summer Days	Finalist
	Jean Stafford	The Catherine Wheel	Finalist
	John Steinbeck	East of Eden	Finalist
	William Carlos Williams	The Build-Up	Finalist
1954	Saul Bellow	The Adventures of Augie March	Winner
	No runners up were recognized.
1955	William Faulkner	A Fable	Winner
	Harriette Arnow	The Dollmaker	Finalist
	Hamilton Basso	The View from Pompey's Head	Finalist
	Davis Grubb	The Night of the Hunter	Finalist
	Randall Jarrell	Pictures from an Institution	Finalist
	Milton Lott	The Last Hunt	Finalist
	Frederick Manfred	Lord Grizzly	Finalist
	William March	The Bad Seed	Finalist
	Wright Morris	The Huge Season	Finalist
	Frank Rooney	The Courts of Memory	Finalist
	John Steinbeck	Sweet Thursday	Finalist
1956	John O'Hara	Ten North Frederick	Winner
	Paul Bowles	The Spider's House	Finalist
	Shirley Ann Grau	The Black Prince, and Other Stories	Finalist
	MacKinlay Kantor	Andersonville	Finalist
	Flannery O'Connor	A Good Man is Hard to Find	Finalist
	May Sarton	Faithful Are the Wounds	Finalist
	Robert Penn Warren	Band of Angels	Finalist
	Eudora Welty	The Bride of the Innisfallen	Finalist
	Herman Wouk	Marjorie Morningstar	Finalist
1957	Wright Morris	The Field of Vision	Winner
	Nelson Algren	A Walk on the Wild Side	Finalist
	James Baldwin	Giovanni's Room	Finalist
	Saul Bellow	Seize the Day	Finalist
	B. J. Chute	Greenwillow	Finalist
	A. B. Guthrie	These Thousand Hills	Finalist
	John Hersey	A Single Pebble	Finalist
	John Hunt	Generations of Men	Finalist
	Edwin O'Connor	The Last Hurrah	Finalist
	J. F. Powers	The Presence of Grace	Finalist
	Elizabeth Spencer	The Voice at the Back Door	Finalist
	James Thurber	Further Fables for Our Time	Finalist
1958	John Cheever	The Wapshot Chronicle	Winner
	James Agee	A Death in the Family	Finalist
	James Gould Cozzens	By Love Possessed	Finalist
	Mark Harris	Something About a Soldier	Finalist
	Andrew Nelson Lytle	The Velvet Horn	Finalist
	Bernard Malamud	The Assistant	Finalist
	Wright Morris	Love Among the Cannibals	Finalist
	Vladimir Nabokov	Pnin	Finalist
	Ayn Rand	Atlas Shrugged	Finalist
	Nancy Wilson Ross	The Return of Lady Brace	Finalist
	May Sarton	The Birth of a Grandfather	Finalist
1959	Bernard Malamud	The Magic Barrel	Winner
	J. P. Donleavy	The Ginger Man	Finalist
	William Humphrey	Home from the Hill	Finalist
	Vladimir Nabokov	Lolita	Finalist
	John O'Hara	From the Terrace	Finalist
	J. R. Salamanca	The Lost Country	Finalist
	Anya Seton	The Winthrop Woman	Finalist
	Robert Traver	Anatomy of a Murder	Finalist

1960s

National Book Award for Fiction winners and finalists, 1960-1969

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1960	Philip Roth	Goodbye, Columbus	Winner
	Louis Auchincloss	Pursuit of the Prodigal	Finalist
	Hamilton Basso	The Light Infantry Ball	Finalist
	Saul Bellow	Henderson the Rain King	Finalist
	Evan S. Connell, Jr.	Mrs. Bridge	Finalist
	William Faulkner	The Mansion	Finalist
	Mark Harris	Wake Up, Stupid	Finalist
	John Hersey	The War Lover	Finalist
	H. L. Humes	Men Die	Finalist
	Shirley Jackson	The Haunting of Hill House	Finalist
	Elizabeth Janeway	The Third Choice	Finalist
	James Jones	The Pistol	Finalist
	Warren Miller	The Cool World	Finalist
	James Purdy	Malcolm	Finalist
	Leo Rosten	The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N	Finalist
	John Updike	The Poorhouse Fair	Finalist
	Robert Penn Warren	The Cave	Finalist
	Morris West	The Devil's Advocate	Finalist
1961	Conrad Richter	The Waters of Kronos	Winner
	Louis Auchincloss	The House of Five Talents	Finalist
	Kay Boyle	Generation Without Farewell	Finalist
	John Hersey	The Child Buyer	Finalist
	John Knowles	A Separate Peace	Finalist
	Harper Lee	To Kill a Mockingbird	Finalist
	Wright Morris	Ceremony in Lone Tree	Finalist
	Flannery O'Connor	The Violent Bear It Away	Finalist
	Elizabeth Spencer	The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales	Finalist
	Francis Steegmuller	The Christening Party	Finalist
	John Updike	Rabbit, Run	Finalist
	Mildred Walker	The Body of a Young Man	Finalist
1962	Walker Percy	The Moviegoer	Winner
	Hortense Calisher	False Entry	Finalist
	George P. Elliott	Among the Dangs	Finalist
	Joseph Heller	Catch-22	Finalist
	Bernard Malamud	A New Life	Finalist
	William Maxwell	The Chateau	Finalist
	J. D. Salinger	Franny and Zooey	Finalist
	Isaac Bashevis Singer	The Spinoza of Market Street and Other Stories	Finalist
	Edward Lewis Wallant	The Pawnbroker	Finalist
	Joan Williams	The Morning and the Evening	Finalist
	Richard Yates	Revolutionary Road	Finalist
1963	J. F. Powers	Morte d'Urban	Winner
	Vladimir Nabokov	Pale Fire	Finalist
	Katherine Anne Porter	Ship of Fools	Finalist
	Dawn Powell	The Golden Spur	Finalist
	Clancy Sigal	Going Away	Finalist
	John Updike	Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories	Finalist
1964	John Updike	The Centaur	Winner
	Bernard Malamud	Idiots First	Finalist
	Mary McCarthy	The Group	Finalist
	Thomas Pynchon	V.	Finalist
	Harvey Swados	The Will	Finalist
1965	Saul Bellow	Herzog	Winner
	Louis Auchincloss	The Rector of Justin	Finalist
	John Hawkes	Second Skin	Finalist
	Richard E. Kim	The Martyred	Finalist
	Wallace Markfield	To an Early Grave	Finalist
	Vladimir Nabokov	The Defense	Finalist
	Isaac Bashevis Singer	Short Friday	Finalist
1966	Katherine Anne Porter	The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter	Winner
	Jesse Hill Ford	The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones	Finalist
	Peter Matthiessen	At Play in the Fields of the Lord	Finalist
	James Merrill	The (Diblos) Notebook	Finalist
	Flannery O'Connor	Everything That Rises Must Converge	Finalist
	Harry Mark Petrakis	Pericles on 31st Street	Finalist
1967	Bernard Malamud	The Fixer	Winner
	Louis Auchincloss	The Embezzler	Finalist
	Edwin O'Connor	All in the Family	Finalist
	Walker Percy	The Last Gentleman	Finalist
	Harry Mark Petrakis	A Dream of Kings	Finalist
	Wilfrid Sheed	Office Politics	Finalist
1968	Thornton Wilder	The Eighth Day	Winner
	Norman Mailer	Why Are We in Vietnam?	Finalist
	Joyce Carol Oates	A Garden of Earthly Delights	Finalist
	Chaim Potok	The Chosen	Finalist
	William Styron	The Confessions of Nat Turner	Finalist
1969	Jerzy Kosiński	Steps	Winner
	John Barth	Lost in the Funhouse	Finalist
	Frederick Exley	A Fan's Notes	Finalist
	Joyce Carol Oates	Expensive People	Finalist
	Thomas Rogers	The Pursuit of Happiness	Finalist

1970s

National Book Award for Fiction winners and finalists, 1970-1979

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1970	Joyce Carol Oates	them	Winner
	Leonard Gardner	Fat City	Finalist
	Leonard Michaels	Going Places	Finalist
	Jean Stafford	The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford	Finalist
	Kurt Vonnegut	Slaughterhouse-Five	Finalist
1971	Saul Bellow	Mr. Sammler's Planet	Winner
	James Dickey	Deliverance	Finalist
	Shirley Hazzard	The Bay of Noon	Finalist
	John Updike	Bech: A Book	Finalist
	Eudora Welty	Losing Battles	Finalist
1972	Flannery O'Connor	The Complete Stories	Winner
	Frederick Buechner	Lion Country	Finalist
	E. L. Doctorow	The Book of Daniel	Finalist
	Stanley Elkin	The Dick Gibson Show	Finalist
	Tom McHale	Farragan's Retreat	Finalist
	Joyce Carol Oates	Wonderland	Finalist
	Cynthia Ozick	The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories	Finalist
	Walker Percy	Love in the Ruins	Finalist
	Earl Thompson	A Garden of Sand	Finalist
	John Updike	Rabbit Redux	Finalist
1973	John Barth	Chimera	Winner
	John Williams	Augustus
	Brock Brower	The Late Great Creature	Finalist
	Alan H. Friedman	Hermaphrodeity	Finalist
	Barry Hannah	Geronimo Rex	Finalist
	George V. Higgins	The Friends of Eddie Coyle	Finalist
	R. M. Koster	The Prince	Finalist
	Vladimir Nabokov	Transparent Things	Finalist
	Ishmael Reed	Mumbo Jumbo	Finalist
	Thomas Rogers	The Confessions of a Child of the Century	Finalist
	Isaac Bashevis Singer	Enemies, A Love Story	Finalist
	Eudora Welty	The Optimist's Daughter	Finalist
1974	Doris Betts	Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories	Winner
	Thomas Pynchon	Gravity's Rainbow
	John Cheever	The World of Apples	Finalist
	Ellen Douglas	Apostles of Light	Finalist
	Stanley Elkin	Searches and Seizures	Finalist
	John Gardner	Nickel Mountain	Finalist
	John Leonard	Black Conceit	Finalist
	Thomas McGuane	Ninety-Two in the Shade	Finalist
	Wilfrid Sheed	People Will Always Be Kind	Finalist
	Isaac Bashevis Singer	A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories	Finalist
	Gore Vidal	Burr	Finalist
	Joy Williams	State of Grace	Finalist
1975	Donald Barthelme	Guilty Pleasures	Winner
	Robert Stone	Dog Soldiers
	Gail Godwin	The Odd Woman	Finalist
	Joseph Heller	Something Happened	Finalist
	Toni Morrison	Sula	Finalist
	Vladimir Nabokov	Look at the Harlequins!	Finalist
	Grace Paley	Enormous Changes at the Last Minute	Finalist
	Philip Roth	My Life As a Man	Finalist
	Mark Smith	The Death of the Detective	Finalist
	Thomas Williams	The Hair of Harold Roux	Finalist
1976	William Gaddis	J R	Winner
	Saul Bellow	Humboldt's Gift	Finalist
	Hortense Calisher	The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher	Finalist
	Johanna Kaplan	Other People's Lives	Finalist
	Vladimir Nabokov	Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories	Finalist
	Larry Woiwode	Beyond the Bedroom Wall	Finalist
1977	Wallace Stegner	The Spectator Bird	Winner
	Raymond Carver	Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?	Finalist
	MacDonald Harris	The Balloonist	Finalist
	Ursula K. Le Guin	Orsinian Tales	Finalist
	Cynthia Propper Seton	A Fine Romance	Finalist
1978	Mary Lee Settle	Blood Tie	Winner
	Robert Coover	The Public Burning	Finalist
	Peter De Vries	Madder Music	Finalist
	James Alan McPherson	Elbow Room	Finalist
	John Sayles	Union Dues	Finalist
1979	Tim O'Brien	Going After Cacciato	Winner
	John Cheever	The Stories of John Cheever	Finalist
	John Irving	The World According to Garp	Finalist
	Diane Johnson	Lying Low	Finalist
	David Plante	The Family	Finalist

1980s

For 1980 to 1983 this list covers the paired "Fiction (hardcover)" and "Fiction (paperback)" awards in that order. Hard and paper editions were distinguished only in these four years; none of the paperback winners were original; in their first editions all had been losing finalists in 1979 or 1981.

From 1980 to 1985 there was also one award for first novel or first work of fiction and in 1980 there were five more awards for mystery, western, and science fiction. None of those are covered here.

1980-1983

National Book Award for Fiction winners and finalists, 1980-1983

Year	Category	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1980	Hardcover	William Styron	Sophie's Choice	Winner
		James Baldwin	Just Above My Head	Finalist
		Norman Mailer	The Executioner's Song	Finalist
		Philip Roth	The Ghost Writer	Finalist
		Scott Spencer	Endless Love	Finalist
	Paperback	John Irving	The World According to Garp	Winner
		Paul Bowles	Collected Stories	Finalist
		Gail Godwin	Violet Clay	Finalist
		John Updike	Too Far to Go	Finalist
		Marguerite Young	Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Volumes 1 and 2	Finalist
1981	Hardcover	Wright Morris	Plains Song: For Female Voices	Winner
		Shirley Hazzard	The Transit of Venus	Finalist
		William Maxwell	So Long, See You Tomorrow	Finalist
		Walker Percy	The Second Coming	Finalist
		Eudora Welty	The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty	Finalist
	Paperback	John Cheever	The Stories of John Cheever	Winner
		Thomas Flanagan	The Year of the French	Finalist
		Norman Mailer	The Executioner's Song	Finalist
		Scott Spencer	Endless Love	Finalist
		Herman Wouk	War and Remembrance	Finalist
1982	Hardcover	John Updike	Rabbit is Rich	Winner
		Mark Helprin	Ellis Island and Other Stories	Finalist
		John Irving	The Hotel New Hampshire	Finalist
		Robert Stone	A Flag for Sunrise	Finalist
		William Wharton	Dad	Finalist
	Paperback	William Maxwell	So Long, See You Tomorrow	Winner
		E. L. Doctorow	Loon Lake	Finalist
		Shirley Hazzard	The Transit of Venus	Finalist
		Walker Percy	The Second Coming	Finalist
		Anne Tyler	Morgan's Passing	Finalist
1983	Hardcover	Alice Walker	The Color Purple	Winner
		Gail Godwin	A Mother and Two Daughters	Finalist
		Bobbie Ann Mason	Shiloh and Other Stories	Finalist
		Paul Theroux	The Mosquito Coast	Finalist
		Anne Tyler	Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant	Finalist
	Paperback	Eudora Welty	The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty	Winner
		David Bradley	The Chaneysville Incident	Finalist
		Mary Gordon	The Company of Women	Finalist
		Marilynne Robinson	Housekeeping	Finalist
		Robert Stone	A Flag for Sunrise	Finalist

1983 entries were published during 1982; winners in 27 categories were announced April 13 and privately celebrated April 28, 1983.

1984 entries for the "revamped" awards in three categories were published November 1983 to October 1984; eleven finalists were announced October 17. Winners were announced and celebrated November 15, 1984.

1984-1989

National Book Award for Fiction winners and finalists, 1984-1989

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1984	Ellen Gilchrist	Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories	Winner
	Alison Lurie	Foreign Affairs	Finalist
	Philip Roth	The Anatomy Lesson	Finalist
1985	Don DeLillo	White Noise	Winner
	Ursula K. Le Guin	Always Coming Home	Finalist
	Hugh Nissenson	The Tree of Life	Finalist
1986	E. L. Doctorow	World's Fair	Winner
	Norman Rush	Whites	Finalist
	Peter Taylor	A Summons to Memphis	Finalist
1987	Larry Heinemann	Paco's Story	Winner
	Alice McDermott	That Night	Finalist
	Toni Morrison	Beloved	Finalist
	Howard Norman	The Northern Lights	Finalist
	Philip Roth	The Counterlife	Finalist
1988	Pete Dexter	Paris Trout	Winner
	Don DeLillo	Libra	Finalist
	Mary McGarry Morris	Vanished	Finalist
	J. F. Powers	Wheat That Springeth Green	Finalist
	Anne Tyler	Breathing Lessons	Finalist
1989	John Casey	Spartina	Winner
	E. L. Doctorow	Billy Bathgate	Finalist
	Katherine Dunn	Geek Love	Finalist
	Oscar Hijuelos	The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love	Finalist
	Amy Tan	The Joy Luck Club	Finalist

1990s

National Book Award for Fiction winners and finalists, 1990-1999

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1990	Charles Johnson	Middle Passage	Winner
	Felipe Alfau	Chromos	Finalist
	Elena Castedo	Paradise	Finalist
	Jessica Hagedorn	Dogeaters	Finalist
	Joyce Carol Oates	Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart	Finalist
1991	Norman Rush	Mating	Winner
	Louis Begley	Wartime Lies	Finalist
	Stephen Dixon	Frog	Finalist
	Stanley Elkin	The MacGuffin	Finalist
	Sandra Scofield	Beyond Deserving	Finalist
1992	Cormac McCarthy	All the Pretty Horses	Winner
	Dorothy Allison	Bastard Out of Carolina	Finalist
	Cristina García	Dreaming in Cuban	Finalist
	Edward P. Jones	Lost in the City	Finalist
	Robert Stone	Outerbridge Reach	Finalist
1993	E. Annie Proulx	The Shipping News	Winner
	Amy Bloom	Come to Me: Stories	Finalist
	Thom Jones	The Pugilist at Rest	Finalist
	Richard Powers	Operation Wandering Soul	Finalist
	Bob Shacochis	Swimming in the Volcano	Finalist
1994	William Gaddis	A Frolic of His Own	Winner
	Ellen Currie	Moses Supposes	Finalist
	Richard Dooling	White Man's Grave	Finalist
	Howard Norman	The Bird Artist	Finalist
	Grace Paley	The Collected Stories	Finalist
1995	Philip Roth	Sabbath's Theater	Winner
	Madison Smartt Bell	All Souls' Rising	Finalist
	Edwidge Danticat	Krik? Krak!	Finalist
	Stephen Dixon	Interstate	Finalist
	Rosario Ferré	The House on the Lagoon	Finalist
1996	Andrea Barrett	Ship Fever and Other Stories	Winner
	Ron Hansen	Atticus	Finalist
	Elizabeth McCracken	The Giant's House	Finalist
	Steven Millhauser	Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer	Finalist
	Janet Peery	The River Beyond the World	Finalist
1997	Charles Frazier	Cold Mountain	Winner
	Don DeLillo	Underworld	Finalist
	Diane Johnson	Le Divorce	Finalist
	Ward Just	Echo House	Finalist
	Cynthia Ozick	The Puttermesser Papers	Finalist
1998	Alice McDermott	Charming Billy	Winner
	Allegra Goodman	Kaaterskill Falls	Finalist
	Gayl Jones	The Healing	Finalist
	Robert Stone	Damascus Gate	Finalist
	Tom Wolfe	A Man in Full	Finalist
1999	Ha Jin	Waiting	Winner
	Andre Dubus III	House of Sand and Fog	Finalist
	Kent Haruf	Plainsong	Finalist
	Patricia Henley	Hummingbird House	Finalist
	Jean Thompson	Who Do You Love	Finalist

2000s

National Book Award for Fiction winners and finalists, 2000-2009

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
2000	Susan Sontag	In America	Winner
	Charles Baxter	The Feast of Love	Finalist
	Alan Lightman	The Diagnosis	Finalist
	Joyce Carol Oates	Blonde	Finalist
	Francine Prose	Blue Angel	Finalist
2001	Jonathan Franzen	The Corrections	Winner
	Dan Chaon	Among the Missing	Finalist
	Jennifer Egan	Look at Me	Finalist
	Louise Erdrich	The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse	Finalist
	Susan Straight	Highwire Moon	Finalist
2002	Julia Glass	Three Junes	Winner
	Mark Costello	Big If	Finalist
	Adam Haslett	You Are Not a Stranger Here	Finalist
	Martha McPhee	Gorgeous Lies	Finalist
	Brad Watson	The Heaven of Mercury	Finalist
2003	Shirley Hazzard	The Great Fire	Winner
	T. C. Boyle	Drop City	Finalist
	Edward P. Jones	The Known World	Finalist
	Scott Spencer	A Ship Made of Paper	Finalist
	Marianne Wiggins	Evidence of Things Unseen	Finalist
2004	Lily Tuck	The News from Paraguay	Winner
	Sarah Shun-lien Bynum	Madeleine is Sleeping	Finalist
	Christine Schutt	Florida	Finalist
	Joan Silber	Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories	Finalist
	Kate Walbert	Our Kind	Finalist
2005	William T. Vollmann	Europe Central	Winner
	E.L. Doctorow	The March	Finalist
	Mary Gaitskill	Veronica	Finalist
	Christopher Sorrentino	Trance	Finalist
	Rene Steinke	Holy Skirts	Finalist
2006	Richard Powers	The Echo Maker	Winner
	Mark Z. Danielewski	Only Revolutions	Finalist
	Ken Kalfus	A Disorder Peculiar to the Country	Finalist
	Dana Spiotta	Eat the Document	Finalist
	Jess Walter	The Zero	Finalist
2007	Denis Johnson	Tree of Smoke	Winner
	Mischa Berlinski	Fieldwork	Finalist
	Lydia Davis	Varieties of Disturbance	Finalist
	Joshua Ferris	Then We Came to the End	Finalist
	Jim Shepard	Like You'd Understand, Anyway	Finalist
2008	Peter Matthiessen	Shadow Country	Winner
	Aleksandar Hemon	The Lazarus Project	Finalist
	Rachel Kushner	Telex from Cuba	Finalist
	Marilynne Robinson	Home	Finalist
	Salvatore Scibona	The End	Finalist
2009	Colum McCann	Let the Great World Spin	Winner
	Bonnie Jo Campbell	American Salvage	Finalist
	Daniyal Mueenuddin	In Other Rooms, Other Wonders	Finalist
	Jayne Anne Phillips	Lark and Termite	Finalist
	Marcel Theroux	Far North	Finalist

2020s

National Book Award for Fiction winners and finalists, 2020–present

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
2020	Charles Yu	Interior Chinatown	Winner
	Rumaan Alam	Leave the World Behind	Finalist
	Lydia Millet	A Children's Bible	Finalist
	Deesha Philyaw	The Secret Lives of Church Ladies	Finalist
	Douglas Stuart	Shuggie Bain	Finalist
2021	Jason Mott	Hell of a Book	Winner
	Anthony Doerr	Cloud Cuckoo Land	Finalist
	Lauren Groff	Matrix	Finalist
	Laird Hunt	Zorrie	Finalist
	Robert Jones Jr.	The Prophets	Finalist
2022	Tess Gunty	The Rabbit Hutch	Winner
	Gayl Jones	The Birdcatcher	Finalist
	Jamil Jan Kochai	The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories	Finalist
	Sarah Thankam Mathews	All This Could Be Different	Finalist
	Alejandro Varela	The Town of Babylon	Finalist
2023	Justin Torres	Blackouts	Winner
	Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah	Chain-Gang All-Stars	Finalist
	Aaliyah Bilal	Temple Folk	Finalist
	Paul Harding	This Other Eden	Finalist
	Hanna Pylväinen	The End of Drum-Time	Finalist
2024	Pemi Aguda	Ghostroots	Finalist
	Kaveh Akbar	Martyr!	Finalist
	Percival Everett	James	Finalist
	Miranda July	All Fours	Finalist
	Hisham Matar	My Friends	Finalist

Early awards for fiction

The National Book Awards for 1935 to 1940 annually recognized the "Most Distinguished Novel" (1935–1936) or "Favorite Fiction" (1937–1940). Furthermore, works of fiction were eligible for the "Bookseller Discovery" and "Most Original Book" awards; fiction winners are listed here.

There was only one National Book Award for 1941, the Bookseller Discovery, which recognized the novel Hold Autumn In Your Hand by George Perry; then none until the 1950 revival in three categories including Fiction.

Most Distinguished Novel (1935–1936)

1935: Rachel Field, Time Out of Mind

1936: Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

Favorite Fiction (1937–1940)

1937: A. J. Cronin, The Citadel

• Conrad Richter, The Sea of Grass
• Kenneth Roberts, Northwest Passage
• Leonard Q. Ross (Leo Rosten), The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (short stories)

1938: Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

1939: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

• Sholom Asch, The Nazarene

1940: Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley

Bookseller Discovery (1936–1941)

1936: Norah Lofts, I Met a Gypsy (short stories)

1937: Lawrence Watkin, On Borrowed Time (novel)

• see 1937 Fiction

1938: see nonfiction

1939: Elgin Groseclose, Ararat (novel)

• Chard Powers Smith, Artillery of Time, I

1940: see nonfiction

1941: George Sessions Perry, Hold Autumn in Your Hand (novel)

Most Original Book (1935–1939)

1935: Charles G. Finney, The Circus of Dr. Lao (novel)

1936: see nonfiction

1937: see nonfiction

• see 1937 Fiction

1938: see nonfiction

1939: Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun (novel)

• Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

Repeat winners

See Winners of multiple U.S. National Book Awards

External links

• The Contenders: 61 Years of National Book Award Fiction Finalists, special exhibit, June 2012. "Down Memory Lane With the National Book Awards (and Not Just the Winners), The New York Times, June 22, 2012.