The poetry award went to
Ruth Stone, 87, for her eighth collection, "In the Next Galaxy"
(Copper Canyon Press), poems of exploration. Ms. Stone raised three
daughters alone while teaching creative writing at colleges and
universities. She lives in Vermont. "I think you gave it to me because
I'm old," said Ms. Stone, a writer with a fiery passion who is admired
by authors as a poet's poet.
Nancy Farmer won the Young People's
Literature award for "The House of the Scorpion," (A Richard Jackson
Book/Atheneum), a futuristic tale about a character called Matteo who
shares identical DNA with the maniacal ruler of a country called
Opium, a strip of poppy fields between the United States and what is
now called Mexico.
Each winner received $10,000.
Notably absent from the nominees were
some of the year's biggest novels, upon which publishers have pinned
high hopes and, in many cases, large sums of money. Missing were Donna
Tartt's "Little Friend," Stephen L. Carter's "Emperor of Ocean Park"
and Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex." Also missing was Jonathan Safran
Foer's much-praised "Everything Is Illuminated" and Alice Sebold's
"Lovely Bones."
Steve Martin, the host, took note of
the relatively obscure list, saying: "I am so pleased to see Robert
Caro was nominated. It brings to two the total number of writers I've
actually heard of."
Mr. Martin also introduced Philip
Roth, who received the National Book Foundation Medal for
Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Noting that Mr. Roth
had won two National Book Awards himself, Mr. Martin wondered aloud,
"If he's so great, where's his Golden Globe, his Emmy, his house's
layout in In Style magazine?"
Mr. Roth, who won the National Book
Award for his first novel, "Goodbye, Columbus," remembered that
evening more than four decades ago when he was in the company of two
other winners, Robert Lowell and the biographer Richard Ellmann. He
won again in 1995 for "Sabbath's Theater."
In his speech he praised the American
language and the freedom that America gave his Jewish parents in
Newark. He decried the self-division of Americans into subgroups, like
"American Jewish." Those labels, he said, are "self-limiting." The
writers who shaped him, he said, were profoundly American, like
Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. And he has spent his 40-year
career, Mr. Roth said, as "a free American," imagining as much as he
has been able to in the native tongue by which he is "gratefully
enslaved."
