Hemings Saga Wins National Book Prize
Matthiessen Trilogy Takes Fiction Award

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 20, 2008

NEW YORK, Nov. 19 -- Annette Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award for nonfiction Wednesday night for "The Hemingses of Monticello," her multigenerational portrait of a family once lost to American history.

Accepting the award, Gordon-Reed spoke of "the journey that black people in this country have been on" since the Hemingses were owned by Thomas Jefferson. Referring to the election of Barack Obama, she added that all of America is "on a great journey now."

Peter Matthiessen won the fiction award for perhaps the most unusual of the evening's nominated books. "Shadow Country" is a heavily reworked, 900-page version of three linked novels Matthiessen published in the 1990s based on the life of the legendary Florida pioneer, murderer and murder victim Edgar J. Watson.

"This book was quite a trial for everybody, including me," Matthiessen said. "It took me 30 years to pull together." He hadn't prepared any remarks, he said, because he worried what he'd do with that "pathetic little speech" in his pocket if he didn't win.

Mark Doty won the poetry award for "Fire to Fire." Judy Blundell took the young people's literature award for "What I Saw and How I Lied."

The nonfiction finalists included historian and Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust for "This Republic of Suffering," Washington-based New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer for "The Dark Side," Jim Sheeler for "Final Salute" and Joan Wickersham for "The Suicide Index."

The other fiction finalists were Aleksandar Hemon for "The Lazarus Project," Rachel Kushner for "Telex From Cuba," Marilynne Robinson for "Home" and Salvatore Scibona for "The End." Kushner's and Scibona's novels were their first.

The awards dinner changed venue this year, to the grand Greek revival ballroom at Cipriani Wall Street, in a building that formerly housed both the New York Stock Exchange and the headquarters of the National City Bank. Given what's happening down the street at the current Exchange, with the Dow dropping below 8,000 just a few hours before, the pre-dinner chatter kept cycling around to the economy.

"It's like you pick up a newspaper and the headline is 'Confederates Fire on Fort Sumter,' " said Faust's husband, Charles Rosenberg, using a historical allusion appropriate to his wife's Civil War specialty.

"Pretty soon all banks will be restaurants," Grove/Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin said jokingly, going on to say that right now, "I'd rather be in the book business than the banking business -- but not by much."

"Are we hearing the string quartet playing on the deck of the Titanic yet?" Public Affairs Executive Editor Clive Priddle asked.

But there was hope.

"Compared to the world around us, where everyone cannot see the bottom," said Priddle's Public Affairs colleague Peter Osnos, "publishers are in a space that they recognize." And hey, unlike other media, "we don't have advertising to lose, and we don't have subscribers."

And there was hopeful talk of Obama as well.

Master of ceremonies Eric Bogosian spoke of the president-elect as both a reader and a writer, which he called "great news for everyone here tonight" -- to sustained applause.

Gordon-Reed said she had been asked repeatedly about the possibility of Obama's election as she toured for "The Hemingses of Monticello." She's still amazed at the Nov. 4 results. "I'm writing about this era when blacks were totally out of civil society -- which was not that long ago," she said. "It hasn't sunk in yet."

Gordon-Reed said she's been a Thomas Jefferson buff since third grade but didn't learn about Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings until a few years later, when she got hold of a copy of Winthrop Jordan's "White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812" -- which sparked her life's work.

In poetry, the other finalists were Frank Bidart ("Watching the Spring Festival"), Reginald Gibbons ("Creatures of the Day"), Richard Howard ("Without Saying") and Patricia Smith ("Blood Dazzler").

Finalists in young people's literature included Laurie Halse Anderson ("Chains"), Kathi Appelt ("The Underneath"), E. Lockhart ("The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks") and Tim Tharp ("The Spectacular Now").

Maxine Hong Kingston, groundbreaking author of "The Woman Warrior" and "China Men," accepted a medal for "distinguished contribution to American letters." Legendary Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset, who fought and won court battles in the 1950s and '60s for the right to publish D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, was honored for "outstanding service to the American literary community."

"It's an additional privilege to receive this award," Rosset said, at a time when, "in the midst of a prevailing economic, moral and environmental sense of doom, a dynamic leader has appeared." And it makes him optimistic about the book business as well.

"Perhaps publishing, that grand, battered and essential institution that I've worked in for more than half a century, will go through a similar renewal," he said.