March 16:
The first National Book Awards were presented on this day in 1950. The
non-fiction winner was Ralph L. Rusk for The
Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson; the poetry winner was William Carlos Williams
for two books, Paterson: Book III and
Selected Poems; the fiction winner
was Nelson Algren for The Man with the
Golden Arm.
Fifteen recent NBA winners
and finalists are interviewed in The Book
That Changed My Life, most of them offering not one influential book but a
truckload. One exception is Don Delillo, who reveals that he read very little
when growing up, and "did not have a strong sense of writerly ambition."
Though he does remember the precise moment when he got the call to begin his
first novel, Americana (1971), in
which a village street's "stillness and wistfulness" became "a
counterpoint of lost innocence":
I was in Southwest Harbor
on Mount Desert Island in Maine, looking down a street filled with elms and
maples and old homes. And there was something in the moment. Some mystery that
made me feel I had to write about it. And even though it took me, oh, I don't
know, two months before I even put word on paper, even the title of the novel
was implicit in that moment.
Cynthia Ozick's interview
places her in a different group, among those born-to-read and born-to-write:
I always wrote, and I
always had writing as an ambition. …I remember composing a poem at the age of
five, before, I could read or write; my mother was my amanuensis. I retain only
the opening two words: "O moon!" …As I grew older, the images of
bleak yet rapturous imposture—particularly in fairy tales—aroused an
inescapable sensation of wanting to write. Princesses turned into mute swans,
princes into beasts…. I began to pursue that truly voluptuous sensation in
middle childhood. I recall having written a story at the age of eleven, and
afterward finding it an embarrassment; so I signed it, self-consciously, "By
the Young Author, Age Nine." Another imposture. It might, I thought, have
been adequate for a nine-year-old, but not for a serious writer of eleven.
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
Subscribe
Email
Print
Share
Please sign in to add a comment on this article.