FDR Biography Is Among 6 Times Book Prize Winners : Arts: Ireland’s Edna O’Brien takes the fiction award. The late O. B. Hardison Jr. wins in the current interest category.

A biography that portrays Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a “consummate actor” and an examination of how technology has affected human values were among six books named Tuesday as winners of the 1990 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.

At a reception for publishers in New York, Times Book Editor Jack Miles announced that Geoffrey C. Ward, author of “A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt,” had won the biography award and O. B. Hardison Jr., author of “Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century,” was being honored posthumously as the recipient of the current interest prize. Each prize carries a $1,000 cash award and a copy of the winning book hand-bound in leather.

Irish novelist Edna O’Brien won the fiction award for “Lantern Slides,” a collection of short stories exploring themes of loneliness and loss set in Ireland, Italy and London, where the writer has lived for the past two decades.

Reviewing “Lantern Slides” for The Times, Elaine Kendall said the collection--the author’s sixth--represents “the essential O’Brien; completely Irish, absolutely universal, the wit and anguish in exquisite equilibrium.” O’Brien has also written 10 novels and several screenplays.

Winner of the history prize was Richard Fletcher, author of “The Quest for El Cid,” a study of Rodrigo Diaz, the 11th Century aristocrat-warrior who became Spain’s first national hero. Demythologizing his subject, Fletcher, who teaches at the University of York in England, depicts him as an ingenious soldier of fortune who used whatever means were necessary to achieve his goals.

In the category of science and technology, Jane S. Smith was honored for “Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine,” a social history of the epidemic that frightened American parents in the 1950s and the scientific discovery that ended their fear. Smith, author of a biography of Elsie de Wolfe, the interior decorator, lives in Evanston, Ill. She was one of 2 million schoolchildren who participated in trials for the Salk vaccine.

John Caddy received the poetry prize for “The Color of Mesabi Bones,” a collection of autobiographical poems that describe his suffering at the hands of an abusive father. The poems are set in the Mesabi mountain range in northeastern Minnesota. Caddy teaches at Hamline University in St. Paul.

Winning authors will be honored at a reception at The Times building on Nov. 2, when the winner of the Robert Kirsch Award will be announced. That award, named for The Times’ late book critic, recognizes a writer who has lived in the West or made it the focus of his or her work.

“A First-Class Temperament” is the second volume of Ward’s psychologically illuminating biography of Roosevelt. Beginning with Roosevelt’s marriage in 1905, the author tracks him through his fledgling legal career to his election as governor of New York and argues that the future president’s acting skills enabled him to cope with the effects of infantile paralysis.

A former editor of Audience and American Heritage magazines, Ward is co-author of “The Civil War,” the documentary series to be aired on PBS next week. He lives in New York.

Roosevelt biographer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has written that Ward’s effort “splendidly illuminates the springs of FDR’s political genius.” The book’s title is drawn from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous remark after meeting Roosevelt in 1933: “A second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament.”

Hardison, who died of cancer on Aug. 5 at age 61, was a professor of English at Georgetown University who wrote many books of cultural criticism. In his last book, he traced this century’s major technological developments and looked at how they have fundamentally altered basic concepts of nature, history, language, art and human evolution.

Author James Dickey has described Hardison’s work as “lively, provocative and often profound. If I were to characterize the general feel of his writing I would call it ‘scholarship on fire.’ ”

The Times has awarded book prizes since 1980. Winners are selected by six committees of three judges each. None of the judges are Times employees.