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College & Research Libraries News

Judges Announced for Twenty-first National Book Awards

The appointment of the seven panels of judges for the twenty-first National Book Awards has been announced by Mason W. Gross, president of Rutgers, The State University (New Jersey) and chairman of the National Book Committee which administers the annual Awards program. The Awards ceremony will be held Wednesday, March 4, 1970, in Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City.

The National Book Awards consist of prizes of $1,000 each, presented annually for books which the seven panels of judges consider the most distinguished works written (or translated) by an American citizen and published in the United States in the preceding year. (The Sciences’ Award alternates with the Philosophy and Religion Award, the latter to be presented in 1970 for books published in 1968 and 1969.)

Judges, five of whom are previous National Book Awards nominees, have been appointed in the following categories:

Arts and Letters

George Boas, writer and educator, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan, and author of twenty books, the most recent of which are The Challenge of Science, The Cult of Childhood‚ and Vox Populi, Essays in the History of an Idea; Bergen Evans, professor of English at Northwestern University, consultant to the National Foundation for the Humanities, editor, author of, among others, Dictionary of Quotations‚ and coauthor of A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage; William Phillips, chairman of the editorial board of Partisan Review, professor of English at Rutgers, reviewer, and author, whose most recent publication is A Sense of the Present, a book of criticism.

Children’s Literature

Barbara Bader, juvenile editor of The Kirkus Review Service, formerly children’s librarian at Queens Borough Public Library, and head of the children’s department of the White Plains Public Library; Frank G. Jennings, editor-at-large for the Saturday Review, Educational Consultant of The New World Foundation, director of college relations at Columbia University Teachers College, and author of This Is Reading; William Jay Smith, serving a second term as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, author of several books of poetry, including Poems: 1947-1957 and The Tin Can and Other Poems (both National Book Award nominees for Poetry), as well as books of criticism and translations and If I Had a Boat and Mr. Smith and Other Nonsense, poems for children.

Fiction

Barbara Epstein, an editor of The New York Review of Books since its inception; Peter Mathiessen, author of At Play in the Fields of the Lord (a 1966 National Book Award nominee for Fiction) and the forthcoming Sal Di Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution, presently working on a new novel; Harvey Swados, novelist and literary journalist, a member of the Literature Faculty of Sarah Lawrence College, and author of The Will (a 1964 National Book Award nominee for Fiction) and the forthcoming Children of Our Time.

History and Biography

Marquis Childs, author and political commentator, served as a special lecturer at Columbia University School of Journalism and Eric W. Allen Memorial Lecturer at the University of Oregon, whose most recent novels are The Peacemakers and Taint of Innocence; James Thomas Flexner, author of fifteen books on the American past and winner of the Parkman Prize for writing history as literature, whose current major work is a biography of George Washington, the third volume of which is scheduled for 1970 publication; Willie Morris, editor-in-chief of Harpers and author, received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship prize for North Towards Home, an autobiographical novel, and taught at Yale in the Poynter Fellowship in 1969.

Poetry

Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, former teacher, widely known speaker and writer on political, economic, and social problems, poet and author, whose most recent books are The Limits of Power and The Year of the People; William Meredith, professor of English at Connecticut College, poet and critic (The Wreck of the Thresher and Other Poems was a 1965 National Book Award nominee for Poetry), is one of twelve Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets; Kenneth Rexroth, poet, critic, translator, columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, and author of The Dragon and the Unicorn, In Defense of the Earth, Complete Poems (all National Book Award nominees for Poetry), and the forthcoming Collected Shorter Poems.

Philosophy and Religion

Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., University Chaplain and Pastor of the Church of Christ at Yale University, author of articles for The Nation, Saturday Review, Christian Century, and Parents Magazine, and activist on social and political issues; Nancy Wilson Ross, novelist and social historian, author of The World of Zen and Three Ways of Asian Wisdom, as well as four novels; Stewart L. Udall, former Secretary of the Interior, author of The Quiet Crisis and 1976: Agenda for Tomorrow, now associated with The Overview Group, a pioneering international consulting firm working for governments and industries to create a better environment for man.

Translation

Paul Engle, director of International Writing Program and Clark Ansley Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Iowa, editor, reviewer, lecturer, author, and poet; Donald Keene, professor of Japanese at Columbia University, author, and translator whose books include Anthology of Japanese Literature, Living Japan, Japanese Literature, and, most recently, The Japanese Discover Europe and a translation of the play, Friends; Maurice Valency, Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University, adaptor, librettist, playwright, and author of In Praise of Love, The Flower and the Castle, and The Breaking String.

Donors of the National Book Awards include the American Booksellers Association, the American Book Publishers Council, the Association of American University Presses, the Book Manufacturers’ Institute, the Children’s Book Council and, for the first time this year, the National Association of College Stores. The prize-program, now in its twenty-first year, has since 1960 been administered by the National Book Committee, Inc., a nonprofit membership group of citizens founded in 1954 to foster the wiser and wider use of books. Roger L. Stevens, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, is chairman of the Awards Advisory Committee which is responsible for supervising the Awards. The Awards Advisory Committee is broadly representative of American letters and of the public interest and includes representatives of each of the donor organizations and others appointed by the chairman of the National Book Committee.

The Awards ceremony will be followed by a cocktail reception for the winners, honored guests, and representatives of the book review media. Surrounding the Awards ceremony during that week will be a program of special events scheduled for visiting book reviewers by varied book industry and literary associations.