National Book Award
Based on Wikipedia: National Book Award
The Prize That Nearly Died Three Times
Every November, in a ballroom somewhere in New York City, a small group of American writers receive bronze sculptures and ten thousand dollar checks. The ceremony is elegant, understated, almost quaint compared to the glittering spectacles that dominate modern award culture. And yet the National Book Awards represent something remarkable: a prize that has survived world wars, industry collapses, and one catastrophically misguided attempt to turn book publishing into Hollywood.
The story of how America's most prestigious literary prize came to exist—and nearly ceased to exist, multiple times—tells us something important about the precarious relationship between commerce and culture, between what sells and what endures.
A Bookseller's Rebellion
The National Book Awards were born in 1936, and their origin story is charmingly democratic. The American Booksellers Association decided to let its members—the people who actually sold books to readers, who watched what customers reached for and what they put back on the shelf—vote for their favorites.
This wasn't about literary merit in the abstract sense. The booksellers weren't academics parsing symbolism or critics constructing theoretical frameworks. They were shopkeepers.
Clifton Fadiman, who served as master of ceremonies in those early years, made this distinction explicit. When asked whether the National Book Awards might conflict with the Pulitzer Prizes, he was refreshingly direct: "Unlike the Pulitzer Prize committee, the booksellers merely vote for their favorite books. They do not say it is the best book or the one that will elevate the standard of manhood or womanhood. Twenty years from now we can decide which are the masterpieces. This year we can only decide which books we enjoyed reading the most."
That humility is striking. Here was a major literary award explicitly refusing to claim it was crowning greatness. It was simply recording enthusiasm.
The early categories reflected this populist spirit. There were awards for "Most Distinguished" works, but also one for "Bookseller Discovery"—essentially a consolation prize for books that deserved more readers than they got. The New York Times, with characteristic bluntness, described it as an award hoping "to draw attention to his work."
By 1941, the Discovery award was all that remained. Then World War Two arrived, and the whole enterprise went dormant.
Resurrection and Reinvention
The awards returned in 1950, but transformed. Three book industry organizations—the American Booksellers Association, the American Book Publishers Council, and the Book Manufacturers Institute—joined forces to rebuild the program on a more structured foundation. Instead of a popularity vote among shopkeepers, there would now be formal judging panels of five experts each.
The inaugural 1950 panels read like a literary hall of fame. For nonfiction: Elmer Davis, John Kieran, Henry Steele Commager, Fairfield Osborn, and Norman Cousins. For poetry: W.H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Babette Deutsch, Horace Gregory, and Louise Untermeyer. These weren't booksellers anymore. These were titans of American letters.
The new system had ambition to match. A National Book Committee was established to administer the awards, funded by publishers and book trade organizations. Over the following decades, categories multiplied. Nonfiction was divided into three separate awards in 1964. Translation appeared in 1967. Children's literature joined in 1969.
But ambition cuts both ways.
The Year Everything Fell Apart
In 1974, publishers withdrew their financial support, and the National Book Committee disbanded. The awards limped through 1975 under a temporary administrator who, according to reports, had to "beg" judges not to split their awards between multiple winners—a sign of how tenuous the whole operation had become.
What happened next was either visionary or delusional, depending on whom you ask.
In 1980, someone decided that what American literature really needed was more Hollywood. The National Book Awards were canceled entirely and replaced by the "American Book Awards," explicitly modeled on the Academy Awards. "It will be run almost exactly the way the Academy Awards are run," a spokesman told reporters.
There would be nearly thirty categories. An extravagant televised ceremony. A standing "academy" of more than two thousand book industry professionals selecting winners.
It was, by most accounts, a disaster.
The implementation was poor. The spectacle felt forced. Books are not movies. The quiet, solitary act of reading doesn't translate well to red carpets and acceptance speeches. By 1983, there were thirty award winners in twenty-seven categories—including eight separate awards for graphics (Pictorial Design, Typographical Design, Illustration Collected Art, and so on). The whole thing had become unwieldy, diffuse, and somehow less prestigious despite all the additional hardware.
The Paperback Problem
Among the stranger experiments of this era was the attempt to give separate awards for hardcover and paperback editions. In 1983, you could win the American Book Award for Fiction (Hardcover), or Fiction (Paperback), or First Novel, or Original Paperback. General Nonfiction had both hardcover and paperback categories. So did History. And Biography. And Science.
The logic, presumably, was that paperback originals represented a different kind of publishing courage—cheaper, more accessible, reaching different audiences. But in practice, it just fragmented attention and diluted the meaning of winning.
Returning to Sanity
Late in 1983, the Association of American Publishers voted to fund a complete overhaul. The American Book Awards were "close to expiring from lack of support," and publishers wanted something simpler, more dignified, more like what they remembered from before the Hollywood fever dream.
Harper and Row president Brooks Thomas anticipated "probably fewer than ten" categories in the new version. What they actually got was three: Fiction, Nonfiction, and First Work of Fiction. The ceremony moved from spring to fall. The name changed back to National Book Awards.
In 1987, New York Times reporter Edwin McDowell covered the November ceremony and couldn't resist noting the contrast with 1983, when there had been ninety-six finalists across twenty-seven categories. Now there were exactly five finalists in each of just two major categories.
The Hearst Trade Book Group chairman who presided over this streamlined version captured the chastened mood perfectly: "Book people are really not actors, and there's a realization now that we should not try to reward things like who did the best book blurb."
The Modern Architecture
Today, the National Book Awards recognize five categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Young People's Literature, and Translated Literature. The National Book Foundation, a nonprofit established in 1988, administers everything.
Poetry was added in 1991. Young People's Literature came in 1996. Translated Literature arrived in 2018, bringing recognition to works in translation for the first time since 1983—a quiet acknowledgment that American literature doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of the world.
The selection process has a pleasing logic to it. Only publishers can nominate books, but the judging panels—five experts in each category, drawn from writers, librarians, booksellers, and literary critics—can request specific nominations if they feel something important has been overlooked. Each panel reads hundreds of books over the course of a year.
Since 2013, the Foundation has released a "longlist" of ten titles per category in September, followed by a finalist list of five titles in October, and finally the winners in November. This graduated reveal builds anticipation while giving more books their moment of recognition.
The numbers involved are staggering. In 2018, 1,637 books were nominated across the five categories, with Nonfiction alone receiving 546 entries. Imagine reading even a fraction of that.
The Medals
Beyond the category awards, the Foundation presents two lifetime achievement honors each year.
The Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters recognizes someone who has "enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work." It comes with a ten thousand dollar cash prize and the implicit statement that your career has mattered, that the cumulative weight of your pages has shifted something in American culture.
The Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, presented since 2005, takes a different angle. It honors individuals who have expanded the audience for literature—editors, publishers, booksellers, librarians, the unsung figures who connect books with readers.
What's striking about the Distinguished Contribution medalists is how many were already National Book Award winners. Saul Bellow. Eudora Welty. David McCullough. John Updike. Philip Roth. The medal often arrives as a kind of capstone, a recognition that the early promise—the prize for a single excellent book—had been fulfilled many times over.
What Makes a Prize Matter?
The National Book Awards exist in a crowded field. The Pulitzer Prizes, established in 1917, carry more name recognition with the general public. The Booker Prize, which began in 1969 for Commonwealth literature (now expanded), arguably has more cachet in international literary circles. The American Book Awards (a different program from the failed 1980s experiment, now administered by the Before Columbus Foundation) explicitly reject the single-winner model in favor of celebrating diversity.
What the National Book Awards offer is something subtler: a prize given by the book industry to the book industry, recognizing work that the people who make and sell books believe deserves attention. It's neither purely commercial (bestsellers don't automatically win) nor purely academic (the judges include working booksellers and librarians, not just professors). It occupies a middle ground that can feel, depending on your perspective, either sensibly pragmatic or frustratingly uncommitted.
The 2024 announcement that U.S. citizenship would no longer be required for eligibility—following a similar change by the Pulitzer Prizes in 2023—suggests the Foundation is thinking carefully about what "American literature" means in a globalized age. If a book is published in America, read by Americans, and contributes to American literary culture, does it matter where the author holds citizenship?
The Mechanics of Recognition
The eligibility window runs from December 1 of the previous year through November 30 of the current year. Publishers must complete nominations in the spring and mail copies to all the panelists—five judges per category, multiplied across the year's worth of reading. The panels compile their shortlists in September.
This timeline has shifted over the years. The pre-war awards were announced in winter, usually February, for books published the previous year. From 1950 through 1983, awards were presented in spring. Since 1984, the ceremony has been held in fall, usually November.
There's something fitting about November as the season for literary recognition. The publishing industry has traditionally built toward the holiday shopping season, and the November announcement gives winning books a crucial boost just as buyers are looking for gifts. Commerce and culture, linked again.
Winners and Finalists
Each finalist receives one thousand dollars, a medal, and a citation written by the judging panel. Winners receive ten thousand dollars and a bronze sculpture.
The money is symbolic more than life-changing for most established authors, but the recognition can genuinely transform a career. A National Book Award win virtually guarantees that a book will remain in print, will be taught in classrooms, will have a place on shelves when other titles from the same year have disappeared. It's a form of cultural preservation disguised as a prize.
For translated literature, the award goes to both the translator and the author—an acknowledgment that translation is an act of creative collaboration, not mere transcription. A great novel poorly translated is a great novel lost. The translator who finds the right words in a second language is performing something close to artistic resurrection.
The Persistence of Books
What's remarkable about the National Book Awards is not that they've existed for nearly ninety years. It's that they've survived near-death experiences repeatedly. World War Two shut them down. Financial collapse in 1974 disbanded the organizing committee. The Hollywood experiment of the 1980s threatened to render the whole concept absurd.
Each time, someone decided that books mattered enough to rebuild the infrastructure of recognition. Each time, the prize emerged leaner, more focused, more conscious of what it was actually trying to accomplish.
The current version—five categories, careful judging panels, a nonprofit foundation with educational missions beyond the awards themselves—represents decades of learning what doesn't work. The spectacle doesn't work. The category proliferation doesn't work. The popularity contests and the academic gatekeeping each have their limits.
What works, apparently, is something modest: a group of experts reading carefully, deliberating honestly, and pointing toward a handful of books each year that deserve more readers than they would otherwise find.
It's not glamorous. It doesn't make for good television. But it's lasted, and in cultural institutions, lasting is its own kind of victory.