Robert Caro, celebrated for his magisterial biographies many years in gestation, finally took home a National Book Award at a generally low-key NBA dinner November 20—but was not at the podium to accept it.
It turned out that his wife had become ill during the meal, and the author took her home—though Knopf chief Sonny Mehta, who accepted the award on Caro's behalf and read his brief prepared speech, said he thought some anxiety about his prospects might have influenced the author's decision to leave early.
In any case, Caro's win for Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson had seemed to most of the 800 attendees at the Marriott Marquis affair the only reasonably sure bet among a field of dark horses—so dark that master of ceremonies Steve Martin joked that he was grateful Caro was nominated "because he brings the number of nominees I've heard of to two."
The lack of recognition quotient was particularly strong in the Fiction category, where a number of the year's high-profile novelists failed to be nominated, and there were no fewer than three debut authors among the nominees. The Fiction judges chair Bob Shacochis called it, in fact, "the year of the thunderclap debut," and it was one of those first novelists, Julia Glass, who won for her Three Junes (Pantheon), a tale of a Scottish family and its experience of love. Glass was an emotional winner who declared that her victory was one "for everyone who blooms late in life," and had warm praise for her agent, Gail Hochman, and for Pantheon's Dan Frank and her editor, Deb Garrison: "I sometimes felt as if mine was the only book they were publishing."
The winner in Young People's Literature was Nancy Farmer for The House of the Scorpion (Atheneum/Richard Jackson), a futuristic tale about a human clone, set in Mexico. Farmer, a previous finalist in 1996, gave a brief acceptance speech, saying that as soon as she got back to her table she could "have a good cry."
The Poetry victor was 87-year-old Ruth Stone, with In the Next Galaxy, published by Copper Canyon Press, a small publisher noted for its poetry list that had two nominees this year. Stone said she had been writing poetry since she was six, and didn't know why she had received the award—"probably because I'm old." She ended by extolling the importance of publishers to creative artists: "They don't do it for that much money."
In his acceptance remarks, Caro said the NBA was "a great honor," and spoke gratefully of the fact that he had "had the same publishing house around me for so many years," noting that his editor, Bob Gottlieb, had been with him for "30 years—four books." He got a laugh when Mehta quoted him as saying, "I do try to keep my books short," and commented on his current project: "Every day with LBJ is a thrilling day."
The National Book Foundation gave its medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters this year to Philip Roth, and the normally reclusive novelist, twice an NBA winner, gave an extended and eloquent speech of thanks. He sketched the background of an immigrant Jewish family in Newark, N.J., in which, feeling initially excluded as a Jew, he grew up haunted by the work of American writers from all corners of the country and came to be entranced by American names and the vigorous language. "I never thought of myself as a Jewish-American writer, but as a native American, writing in a tongue to which I am most gratefully enslaved."
