Surprise Ending at National Book Awards

In the book world’s version of David vs. Goliath, first-time novelist Charles Frazier won the National Book Award for fiction on Tuesday, beating out the heavy favorite, Don DeLillo.

Frazier, cited for his Civil War novel, “Cold Mountain,” said even he had DeLillo on his mind as the award was being announced.

“I was thinking about reading ‘End Zone’ on a long backpacking trip in the North Cascades, or reading ‘White Noise’ when I had pneumonia and a fever of 105 and just being amazed that I would even be in the same company,” said Frazier, who received $10,000 for winning the prize.

Frazier’s novel tells the story of a wounded Southern veteran finding his way back home. The book received strong reviews and was a surprise best seller.

DeLillo, who won the award in 1985 for “White Noise,” was expected to repeat this year with “Underworld,” an 800-page novel about the Cold War and American culture. It has garnered near-unanimous praise and was thought by many to be the novel of the year.

Also Tuesday night, Joseph Ellis won the nonfiction prize for “American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson.”

Han Nolan won the prize for young people’s literature for “Dancing on the Edge,” and William Meredith won the poetry prize for “Effort at Speech: New & Selected Poems.”

Meredith, who for several years could not speak because of a stroke, told the audience at a Manhattan hotel ceremony, “I’m talking much better. I’m thinking much better now. . . . I am well now.”

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Studs Terkel received a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

“There’s an irony here. I am being celebrated for celebrating the uncelebrated,” said the 85-year-old author of such oral histories as “Working” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Good War.”

The other fiction finalists were two-time nominee Diane Johnson for “Le Divorce”; Ward Just for the political epic “Echo House”; and 1972 finalist Cynthia Ozick for “The Puttermesser Papers.”

In nonfiction, the other finalists were David I. Kertzer for “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara”; Jamaica Kincaid for her brutally frank tale of her brother’s AIDS death, “My Brother”; poet/undertaker Thomas Lynch for his essays “The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade”; and Sam Tanenhaus for his biography “Whittaker Chambers.”

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Also nominated for poetry were John Balaban for “Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New & Selected Poems”; Frank Bidart for “Desire”; Sarah Lindsay for “Primates Behavior”; and Marilyn Nelson for “The Fields of Praise: New & Selected Poems.”

Finalists in the young people’s literature category included Brock Cole for “The Facts Speak for Themselves”; Adele Griffin for “Sons of Liberty”; Mary Ann McGuigan for “Where You Belong”; and Tor Seidler for “Men Margaret.”

The awards were presented by the National Book Foundation. Each of the winners received $10,000 and all of the finalists won $1,000.