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National Book Award for Fiction
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Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist. His best known work is his play Our Town.
Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and was the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a U.S. diplomat, and Isabella...
William Faulkner
William Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was a Nobel Prize-winning American author. One of the most influential writers of the 20th century, his reputation is based on his novels, novellas and short stories. He was also a published poet...
Nelson Algren
Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981) was an American writer.
Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan. At the age of three he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois where they lived in a working-class, immigrant...
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Conrad Richter
Conrad Michael Richter (October 13, 1890-October 30, 1968) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist whose lyrical work focuses on life along the American frontier.
Born in Pine Grove, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Conrad Richter was the son...
James Jones
James Ramon Jones (November 6, 1921 – May 9, 1977) was an American author known for his explorations of World War II and its aftermath.
Jones was born and raised in Robinson, Illinois, the son of Ramon and Ada M. (née Blessing) Jones. He enlisted in...
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Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914 – April 16, 1994) was an African-American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man (ISBN 0-679-60139-2), which won...
John O'Hara
John Henry O'Hara (January 31, 1905–April 11, 1970) was an American writer born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. He initially made a name for himself with his short stories and later became a best-selling novelist whose works include Appointment in...
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Wright Morris
Wright Marion Morris (January 6, 1910 in Central City, Nebraska – April 25, 1998) was an award-winning American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and...
Walker Percy
Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The...
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J. F. Powers
J. F. (James Farl) Powers (8 July 1917 Jacksonville, Illinois - 12 June 1999 Collegeville, Minnesota) was a Roman Catholic American novelist and short-story writer who often drew his inspiration from developments in the Catholic Church, and was...
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Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890 – September 18, 1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes...
Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914, Brooklyn, New York – March 18, 1986) was an author of novels and short stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The...
William Styron
William Clark Styron, Jr. (June 11, 1925 – November 1, 2006) was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.
For much of his career, Styron was best known for his novels, which included
Styron's influence deepened...
Jerzy Kosiński
Jerzy Kosiński (June 14, 1933 – May 3, 1991) was a Polish-American novelist, best known for the novels The Painted Bird (1965) and Being There (1971), the latter of which was adapted into a film in 1979.
Kosiński was born Józef Lewinkopf to Jewish...
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Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American author. Raised in rural, working-class New York, Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non...
Flannery O'Connor
Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist.
An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and...
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Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an award-winning American author who wrote short stories and novels about the American South. Her book, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and Welty was awarded the...
John Barth
John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.
John Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced...
John Edward Williams
John Edward Williams (1922 - 1994) was a writer best known for his novels Stoner and Augustus.
Williams was born on August 29, 1922, in Clarksville, Texas, near the Red River east of Paris, Texas and brought up in Texas. His grandparents were...
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Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist based in New York City and noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the United States Navy and earned an English...
Robert Stone
Robert Stone (born August 21, 1937) is an American novelist. His work is typically characterized by psychological complexity, political concerns, and dark humor. His novels include the National Book Award–winning Dog Soldiers (1974), and the PEN...
Thomas Williams
Thomas Williams (1926-October 23, 1990) was an American writer.
His family moved to New Hampshire when he was a child, and Williams spent most of his life in the state. He worked as a writer and teacher at the University of New Hampshire, and is the...
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Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to have won...
Wallace Stegner
Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993) was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972.
Stegner was born in...
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish: יצחק באַשעװיס זינגער) (November 21, 1902 (see notes below) – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-born Jewish American Nobel Prize-winning author and one of the leading figures in the Yiddish literary movement.
Isaac Bashevis...
Mary Lee Settle
Mary Lee Settle (July 29, 1918 Charleston, West Virginia - September 27, 2005 Ivy, Virginia) was an American writer and winner of the National Book Award for her 1978 novel Blood Tie. She was also one of the founders of the annual PEN/Faulkner Award...
Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien (born October 1, 1946 in Austin, Minnesota) is an American novelist who mainly writes about his experiences in the Vietnam War and the impact the war had on the American soldiers who fought there. He currently holds the endowed chair at...
John Cheever
John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New...
John Irving
John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt, Jr.; March 2, 1942) is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978....
William Keepers Maxwell, Jr.
William Keepers Maxwell, Jr. (August 16, 1908 – July 31, 2000) was an American novelist and editor.
Maxwell was born in Lincoln, Illinois, and attended the University of Illinois and Harvard University. He was best known as the fiction editor of The...
William Gaddis
William Gaddis (December 29, 1922 – December 16, 1998) was an American novelist. He wrote five novels, two of which won National Book Awards.
Gaddis was born in New York City to William Thomas Gaddis, who worked "on Wall Street and in politics," and...
Alice Walker
Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author. She has written at length on issues of race and gender, and is most famous for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction....
Ellen Gilchrist
Ellen Gilchrist (born February 20, 1935) is an American novelist, short story writer, and poet.
Gilchrist was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and spent part of her childhood on a plantation owned by her maternal grandparents. She earned a bachelor...
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Larry Heinemann
This article is about the American novelist, not the composer/musician known for his collaborations with Blue Man Group.
Larry Heinemann (born 1944) is an American novelist born and raised in Chicago. His body of work--three novels and a memoir--is...
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Pete Dexter
Pete Dexter (born 1943) is an American novelist. He was the recipient of the 1988 National Book Award for Fiction for his novel Paris Trout.
Dexter was born in Pontiac, Michigan. After his father died, when Dexter was four, he and his mother moved...
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John Casey
John Casey (born 1939 in Worcester, Massachusetts) is an American writer and translator. He won the National Book Award in 1989 for his novel Spartina.
Casey went to school at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the University of Iowa. He...
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Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American author, literary theorist, and political activist.
Sontag, born Susan Rosenblatt, was born in New York City to Jack Rosenblatt and Mildred Jacobsen, both Jewish Americans. Her...
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.
Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit...
Norman Rush
Norman Rush (born October 24, 1933) is an American novelist whose introspective novels and short stories are set in Botswana in the 1980s. He is the son of Roger and Leslie (Chesse) Rush. He was the recipient of the 1991 National Book Award and the...
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Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American author whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He currently lives near New York City.
DeLillo was born in the Bronx in New York City, a...
E. Annie Proulx
Edna Annie Proulx (pronounced /ˈpruː/) (born August 22, 1935) is an American journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994, and was made into a...
Charles Frazier
Charles Frazier (born November 4, 1950) is an award-winning American historical novelist.
Frazier was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1973. He earned an M.A. from Appalachian State University...
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Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 story collection Goodbye, Columbus, and has since become one of the most honored authors of his generation: Roth's books have twice been awarded the...
Alice McDermott
Alice McDermott (born June 27, 1953) is Johns Hopkins University's Richard A Macksey Professor of the Humanities. Born in Brooklyn, New York, McDermott attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, Long Island, NY [1967], Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead...
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Charles R. Johnson
Charles R. Johnson (born 1948 in Evanston, Illinois) is an American scholar and author of novels, short stories, and essays. Johnson, an African-American, has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Middle Passage...
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Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen (born August 17, 1959) is an American novelist and essayist.
Franzen was born in Chicago, Illinois, raised in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Swarthmore College. He also studied on a Fulbright...
Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen (born May 22, 1927, in New York City) is a two-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and nonfiction writer as well as an environmental activist. He frequently focuses on American Indian issues and history, as in his...
Andrea Barrett
Andrea Barrett (born November 16, 1954) is an American writer. Barrett received her B.A. in biology from Union College and briefly attended a Ph.D. program in zoology. She began writing fiction seriously in her thirties, but was relatively unknown...
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Julia Glass
Julia Glass (born March 23, 1956, in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American writer. Her debut novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award in 2002. Glass followed this up with a second novel, The Whole World Over, in 2006, which was also set in...
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Shirley Hazzard
Shirley Hazzard (born 30 January 1931) is an author of fiction and non-fiction. She was born in Australia, but holds citizenship in Great Britain and the United States.
Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia, and attended Queenwood School for Girls...
Lily Tuck
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Ha Jin
Jīn Xuěfēi (Simplified Chinese: 金雪飞; Traditional Chinese: 金雪飛; born February 21, 1956) is a contemporary Chinese-American writer using the pen name Ha Jin (哈金). He was born in Liaoning, China. “Ha” comes from his favorite city, Harbin. In 1984, he...
William T. Vollmann
William Tanner Vollmann (born July 28, 1959 in Los Angeles, California) is an American novelist, journalist, short story writer, essayist and winner of the National Book Award. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife and daughter.
Vollmann...
Richard Powers
Richard Powers (born June 18, 1957) is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology.
Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois, and his family later moved a few miles south to Lincolnwood, where his father was...
E. L. Doctorow
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (born January 6, 1931, New York, New York) is an American author.
Edgar Lawrence ("E.L.") Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent. He attended city...
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy, born Charles McCarthy (born July 20, 1933), is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres, and has also written plays and screenplays. He received the...
Denis Johnson
Denis Johnson (born 1949 in Munich, West Germany) is an American author who is best known for his short story collection Jesus' Son (1992) and his novel Tree of Smoke (2007), which won the National Book Award.
Johnson holds a masters (MFA) degree...
