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Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey (2006)National Book Award (1950-2006)
The National Book Awards were first given in 1950 to enhance the public's awareness of exceptional books written by fellow Americans, and to increase the popularity of reading in general. The awards are now given annually to recognize achievements in four genres: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and young people's literature.
Click on the title to read a short summary of the book, and to place a hold.
The number in parentheses after each book is the year in which it was awarded the National Book Award.
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Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey (2006)
The
Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation by M. T. Anderson
(2006)
The
Echo Maker by Richard Powers (2006)
The
Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust
Bowl by Timothy Egan (2006)
The
Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall (2005)
Europe
Central by William T. Vollman (2005)
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)
Migration: New and Selected Poems by W.S. Merwin (2005)
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle (2004)
Godless by Pete Hautman (2004)
Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 by Jean Valentine (2004)
The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck (2004)
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard (2003)
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos Eire (2003)
The Singing by C.K. Williams (2003)
The Canning Season by
Polly Horvath (2003)
Three Junes by Julia Glass (2002)
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro (2002)
In the Next Galaxy by Ruth Stone (2002)
The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer (2002)
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon (2001)
Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry by Alan Dugan (2001)
True Believer by Virginia Euwer Wolff (2001)
In America by Susan Sontag (2000)
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick (2000)
Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 by Lucille Clifton (2000)
Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan (2000)
Waiting by Ha Jin (1999)
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower (1999)
Vice: New and Selected Poems by Ai (1999)
When Zachary Beaver Came to Town by Kimberly Willis Holt (1999)
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott (1998)
Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball (1998)
This Time: New and Selected Poems by Gerald Stern (1998)
Holes by Louis Sachar (1998)
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (1997)
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph J. Ellis (1997)
Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems by William Meredith (1997)
Dancing on the Edge by Han Nolan (1997)
Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett (1996)
An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us by James Carroll(1996)
Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey by Hayden Carruth (1996)
Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida by Victor Martinez (1996)
Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth (1995)
The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism by Tina Rosenberg (1995)
Passing Through: The Later Poems by Stanley Kunitz (1995)
A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis (1994)
How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter by Sherwin B. Nuland (1994)
A Worshipful Company of Fletchers by James Tate (1994)
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (1993)
United States: Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal (1993)
Garbage by A. R. Ammons (1993)
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (1992)
Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story by Paul Monette (1992)
New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver (1992)
Mating by Norman Rush (1991)
Freedom in the Making of Western Culture by Orlando Patterson (1991)
What Work Is by Philip Levine (1991)
Middle Passage by Charles Johnson (1990)
The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow (1990)
Spartina by John Casey (1989)
From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman (1989)
Paris Trout by Pete Dexter (1988)
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan (1988)
Paco's Story by Lary Heinemann (1987)
The Making of the Atom Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1987)
World's Fair by E.L. Doctorow (1986)
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez (1986)
White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985)
Easy in the Islands by Bob Shacochis (1985)
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by J. Anthony Lukas (1985)
Victory over Japan: A Book of Stories by Ellen Gilchrist (1984)
Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr (1984)
Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845 by Robert V. Remini (1984)
Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller by Judith Thurman (1983)
Homesick: My Own Story by Jean Fritz (1983)
A Place Apart by Paula Fox (1983)
Marked by Fire by Joyce Carol Thomas (1983)
Chimney Sweeps by James Cross Giblin (1983)
Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney (1983)
Doctor De Soto by William Steig (1983)
A House is a House for Me by Mary Ann Hoberman (1983)
The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983)
Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty (1983)
The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor (1983)
China: Alive in the Bitter Sea by Fox Butterfield (1983)
National Defense by James Fallows (1983)
Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression by Alan Brinkley (1983)
Utopian Thought in the Western World by Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel (1983)
The Red Magician by Lisa Goldstein (1983)
Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell (1983)
Country Music: Selected Early Poems by Charles Wright (1983)
"Subtle is the Lord...": The Science and Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais (1983)
The Mathematical Experience by Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh (1983)
Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal translated by Richard Howard (1983)
Mornings on Horseback by David McCullogh (1982)
Walter Lippmann and the American Century by Ronald Steel (1982)
Westmark by Lloyd Alexander (1982)
Words by Heart by Ouida Sebestyen (1982)
A Penguin Year by Susan Bonners (1982)
Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak (1982)
Noah's Ark by Peter Spier (1982)
Rabbit is Rich by John Updike (1982)
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (1982)
Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew (1982)
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1982)
Naming Names by Victor S. Navasky (1982)
People of a Sacred Mountain: A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies, 1830-1879 by Father Peter John Powell (1982)
The Generation of 1914 by Robert Wohl (1982)
Life Supports: New and Collected Poems by William Bronk (1982)
Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald C. Johnason and Maitland A. Edey (1982)
Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists by Fred Alan Wolf (1982)
Higuchi Ichiyo's In the Shade of Spring Leaves translated by Robert Lyons Danly (1982)
The Ten Thousand Leaves: A Translation of the Man'Youshu, Japan's Premier Anthology of Classical Poetry translated by Ian Hideo Levy (1982)
Walt Whitman, A Life by Justin Kaplan (1981)
Samuel Beckett by Deirdre Basir (1981)
The Night Swimmers by Betsy Byars (1981)
Ramona and Her Mother by Beverly Cleary (1981)
Oh, Boy! Babies! by Alison Cragin Herzig and Jane Lawrence (1981)
Plains Song by Wright Morris (1981)
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1981)
Sister Wolf by Ann Arensberg (1981)
China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston (1981)
The Last Cowboy by Jane Kramer (1981)
Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality by John Boswell (1981)
Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery by Leon F. Litwack (1981)
The Need to Hold Still by Lisel Mueller (1981)
The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections on Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould (1981)
The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas (1981)
The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830-1857 by Francis Steegmuller (1981)
Lauren Bacall by Myself by Lauren Bacall (1980)
And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History 1918-1978 by Malcolm Cowley (1980)
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris (1980)
Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg (1980)
A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal by Joan W. Blos (1980)
A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle (1980)
Julia Child and More Company by Julia Child (1980)
The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch (1980)
Sophie's Choice by William Styron (1980)
The World According to Garp by John Irving (1980)
Birdy by William Wharton (1980)
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (1980)
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen (1980)*******
The Complete Directory by Elder Witt, ed. (1980)
The Complete Directory of Prime Time Network TV Shows: 1946-Present by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh (1980)
The White House Years by Henry A. Kissinger (1980)
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman (1980)
The Green Ripper by John D. MacDonald (1980)
Stained Glass by William F. Buckley, Jr. (1980)
Ashes by Philip Levine (1980)
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels (1980)
A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken (1980)
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1980)
The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics by Gary Zukav (1980)
Jem by Frederik Pohl (1980)
The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, Jr. (1980)
Cesare Pavese's Hard Labor translated by William Arrowsmith (1980)
Osip E. Mandelstam's Complete Critical Prose and Letters translated by Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (1980)
Bendigo Shafter by Louis L'Amour (1980)
Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1979)
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson (1979)
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen (1979)*********
Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien (1979)
Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763 by Richard Beale Davis (1979)
Mirabell: Book of Numbers by James Merrill (1979)
Cesar Vallejo's The Complete Posthumous Poetry translated by Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubin Barcia (1979)
Samuel Johnson by W. Jackson Bate (1978)
The View From the Oak by Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl (1978)
Winners and Losers by Gloria Emerson (1978)
Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle (1978)
The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914 by David McCullough (1978)
The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov by Howard Nemerov (1978)
Uwe George's In the Deserts of This Earth translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston (1978)
Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist by W.A. Swanberg (1977)
The Master Puppeteer by Katherine Paterson (1977)
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim (1977)
The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner (1977)
World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe (1977)
Collected Poems, 1930-1976 by Richard Eberhart (1977)
Master Tung's Western Chamber Romance translated by Li-Li Ch'en (1977)
The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell (1976)
Bert Breen's Barn by Walter D. Edmonds (1976)
Passage to Ararat by Michael J. Arlen (1976)
Jr by William Gaddis (1976)
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 by David Brion Davis (1976)
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery (1976)
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone (1975)
The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams (1975)
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas (1975)
Marcel Proust by Roger Shattuck (1975)
M.C. Higgins the Great by Virginia Hamilton (1975)
The Life of Emily Dickinson by Richard B. Sewall (1975)
All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw by Theodore Rosengarten (1975)
The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson by Bernard Bailyn (1975)
Anarchy, State and Utopia by Robert Nozick (1975)
Interpretation of Schizophrenia by Silvano Arieti (1975)
Presentation Piece by Marilyn Hacker (1975)
The Agony of Christianity and Essays on Faith by Miguel D. Unamuno (1974)
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1974)
A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1974)
Deeper into Movies by Pauline Kael (1974)
The Court of the Stone Children by Eleanor Cameron (1974)
Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian by John Clive (1974)
Malcolm Lowry: A Biography by Douglas Day (1974)
The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York v. Lumumba Shakur et al. by Murray Kempton (1974)
Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks by Maurice Natanson (1974)
Life: The Unfinished Experiment by S.E. Luria (1974)
The Fall of America: Poems of these States by Allen Ginsberg (1974)
Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich (1974)
The Confessions of Lady Nijo translated by Karen Brazell (1974)
Octavio Paz's Alternating Current translated by Helen R. Lane (1974)
Paul Valery's Monsieur Teste translated by Jackson Matthews (1974)
Augustus by John Williams (1973)
Chimera by John Barth (1973)
Diderot by Arthur M. Wilson (1973)
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. LeGuin (1973)
George Washington, Vol. IV: Anguish and Farewell, 1793-1799 by James Thomas Flexner (1973)
Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam by Frances FitzGerald (1973)
The Children of Pride edited by Robert Manson Myers (1973)
A Religious History of the American People by S.E. Ahlstrom (1973)
The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations by George B. Schaller (1973)
Collected Poems, 1951-1971 by A.R. Ammons (1973)
The Aeneid of Virgil translated by Allen Mandelbaum (1973)
The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (1972)
The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven by Charles Rosen (1972)
The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or The Hitherine Thithering Djinn by Donald Barthelme (1972)
Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers by Joseph P. Lash (1972)
The Last Whole Earth Catalog edited by Stewart Brand (1972)
Ordeal of the Union, Vols. VII and VIII: The Organized War, 1863-1864 and The Organized War to Victory by Allan Nevins (1972)
Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America by Martin E. Mary (1972)
The Blue Whale by George L. Small (1972)
The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara by Frank O'Hara (1972)
Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity translated by Austryn Wainhouse (1972)
Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow (1971)
Cocteau: A Biography by Francis Steegmuller (1971)
The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian by Lloyd Alexander (1971)
Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom by James MacGregor Burns (1971)
Science in the British Colonies of America by Raymond Phineas Sterns (1971)
To See, To Take by Mona Van Duyn (1971)
Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards translated by Frank Jones (1971)
Yasunari Kawabata's The Sound of The Mountain translated by Edwards G. Seidensticker (1971)
Them by Joyce Carol Oates (1970)
An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir by Lillian Hellman (1970)
A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1970)
Huey Long by T. Harry Williams (1970)
Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence by Erik H. Erikson (1970)
The Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop (1970)
Celine's Castle to Castle translated by Ralph Manheim (1970)
Steps by Jerzy Kosinski (1969)
The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History by Norman Mailer (1969)
Journey from Peppermint Street by Meindert DeJong (1969)
White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 by Winthrop D. Jordan (1969)
Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima by Robert J. Lifton (1969)
His Toy, His Dream, His Rest by John Berryman (1969)
Calvino's Cosmicomics translated by William Weaver (1969)
The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder (1968)
Selected Essays by William Troy (1968)
Memoirs: 1925-1950 by George F. Kennan (1968)
Death at an Early Age by Jonathan Kozol (1968)
The Light Around the Body by Robert Bly (1968)
Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers translated by Howard and Edna Hong (1968)
The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (1967)
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography by Justin Kaplan (1967)
The Enlightenment, Vol. I: An Interpretation by Peter Gay (1967)
La Vida: A Puerto Rican family in the culture of poverty - San Juan and New York by Oscar Lewis (1967)
Nights and Days by James Merrill (1967)
Casanova's History of My Life translated by Gregory Rabassa (1967)
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
Paris Journal by Janet Flanner (1966)
A Thousand Days by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1966)
Buckdancer's Choice: Poems by James Dickey (1966)
Herzog by Saul Bellow (1965)
Oysters of Locmariaquer by Eleanor Clark (1965)
The Life of Lenin by Louis Fischer (1965)
God and Golem, Inc: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion by Norbert Wiener (1965)
The Far Field by Theodore Roethke (1965)
The Centaur by John Updike (1964)
John Keats: The Making of a Poet by Aileen Ward (1964)
The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community by William H. McNeill (1964)
Man-made America by Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev (1964)
Selected Poems by John Crowe Ransom (1964)
Morte D'Urban by J.F. Powers (1963)
Henry James, Vol. II: The Conquest of London, Henry James, Vol. III: The Middle Years by Leon Edel (1963)
Traveling Through the Dark by William Stafford (1963)
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1962)
The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations and its Prospects by Lewis Mumford (1962)
Poems by Alan Dugan (1962)
The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter (1961)
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer (1961)
Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth (1960)
James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (1960)
Life Studies by Robert Lowell (1960)
The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud (1959)
Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame De Stael by J. Christopher Herold (1959)
Words for the Wind by Theodore Roethke (1959)
The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever (1958)
The Lion and the Throne by Catherine Drinker Bowen (1958)
Promises: Poems, 1954-1956 by Robert Penn Warren (1958)
The Field of Vision by Wright Morris (1957)
Russia Leaves the War by George F. Kennan (1957)
Things of the World by Richard Wilbur (1957)
Ten North Frederick by John O'Hara (1956)
An American in Italy by Herbert Kubly (1956)
The Shield of Achilles by W.H. Auden (1956)
A Fable by William Faulkner (1955)
The Measure of Man by Joseph Wood Krutch (1955)
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens (1955)
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1954)
A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton (1954)
Collected Poems by Conrad Aitken (1954)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1953)
The Course of an Empire by Bernard A. De Voto (1953)
Collected Poems, 1917-1952 by Archibald MacLeish (1953)
From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1952)
The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson (1952)
Collected Poems by Marianne Moore (1952)
The Collected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner (1951)
The Auroras of Autumn by Wallace Stevens (1951)
The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren (1950)
The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph L. Rusk (1950)
Paterson: Book III and Selected Poems by William Carlos Williams (1950)