1st-Time Novelists Among Book Award Nominees

The nominees for fiction in the 1990 National Book Awards include two first-time novelists and an 88-year-old author who completed his work in 1948 but could not find a publisher until last year.

The nominees were announced today by the National Book Foundation, the nonprofit organization that sponsors the annual awards.

The fiction nominees include Felipe Alfau, an 88-year-old Spanish native who immigrated to the United States during World War I. His book, “Chromos,” is set in Manhattan in the 1930s.

Two other first-time novelists nominated in the fiction category are also immigrants.

Elena Castedo, born in Chile, wrote “Paradise,” about a Latin American ghetto family.

Jessica Hagedorn’s “Dogeaters” explores native tradition and popular American culture colliding in the Philippines, Hagedorn’s homeland.

The other fiction nominees are Charles Johnson for his work “Middle Passage” and Joyce Carol Oates for “Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart.”

Johnson’s historical novel charts a newly freed slave’s voyage aboard a slave clipper ship bound for Africa in 1830. Oates, who won the 1970 National Book Award for fiction, wrote about an adolescent girl’s coming of age in the 1950s and ‘60s.

The finalists in the nonfiction category are:

* Ron Chernow for “The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance.”

* Samuel G. Freedman for “Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School.”

* Roger Morris for “Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.”

* Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith for “Jackson Pollock: An American Saga.”

* T. H. Watkins for “Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874-1952.”

Judges selected the nominees from a record submission of 375