May 2012
6 posts
In Memory of Paul Fussell (1924-2012)
Paul Fussell won the National Book Award in 1976 in the Arts and Letters category for his landmark study of WWI, The Great War and Modern Memory. In his acceptance speech, Fussell said, “I would like to think that your award to this book of mine might be taken as an action inviting criticism to return to its time-honored tasks―tasks, after all, which Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot did not...
Happy 85th Birthday, Peter Matthiessen!
Peter Matthiessen won the National Book Award three times: in 1979 and 1980 for The Snow Leopard, and in 2008 for Shadow Country. He was also a Finalist in 1966 for At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and in 1973 with Eliot Porter for The Tree Where Man Was Born/The African Experience.
Photo © Robin Platzer/Twin Images
Watch“There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”
-Patti Smith accepting the 2010 National Book Award in Nonfiction for her memoir, Just Kids
Remembering Maurice Sendak
Photo by John Dugdale
“I gratefully accept this award and wish to thank my editor and best friend, Ursula Nordstrom, along with William Blake, Randolph Caldecott, Jean de Brunhoff, and all those grand masters of the picture book―that delectable, bright, and beautiful form that has yet to be recognized as more than a form proper only to books for children. Hail to the glorious picture...
