Pulitzer Winner Is Among 9 Honored With Times Book Prizes

A. Scott Berg, who won a Pulitzer Prize last week for his biography of Charles Lindbergh, was honored again Friday night when he was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography.

Judges in The Times’ 19th annual book contest praised Berg’s “Lindbergh” for its “cinematic sweep, novelistic detail and writerly grace” and said it embodied “the grandeur, tragedy and madness of our century with an intimacy--and a cumulative power--that few biographies achieve.” Berg, who has also written critically acclaimed biographies of Maxwell Perkins and Samuel Goldwyn, worked on “Lindbergh” for eight years. The book was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

The presentation of the Times Book Prizes, previously an invitation-only ceremony at the paper’s corporate headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, was open to the public for the first time this year and was held in Royce Hall at UCLA. The Times’ Festival of Books will be held on the campus today and Sunday.

This was also the first time that winners were not notified in advance. The Times flew all available finalists in for the event, and the identities of the winners were not announced until the ceremony.

The Times presented prizes in eight categories Friday night and also gave the Robert Kirsch Award to John Sanford, who has written 24 works of fiction, history, memoir, poetry and collected letters over the past 60 years. His work, said Times Book Editor Steve Wasserman, is “characterized by an impulse to outrage” over racism, sexism, unfairness and inequality.

The Kirsch Award, named for the paper’s literary critic from 1954 to 1980, is given annually to recognize the body of work of a writer living in and/or writing about the American West.

Sanford, who became a writer because of his boyhood friend Nathanael West, author of “The Day of the Locust,” moved to Hollywood from New York in 1936, when Paramount expressed interest in his second novel, “The Old Man’s Place.” He and his wife, screenwriter Marguerite Roberts, became Hollywood bon vivants but have long lived in seclusion in the hills of Montecito, where they moved when they were “hounded out of Hollywood during the McCarthy era,” as Kirsch’s son Jonathan said in presenting the award.

Sanford, now 95, was unable to attend the ceremony, but in videotaped remarks he paid special tribute to his wife, who died in 1989 after 51 years of marriage. Together, the two wrote the screenplay for “Honky Tonk,” a 1941 MGM hit movie starring Clark Gable and Lana Turner. But Maggie, as she was known, had seen something special in the two novels Sanford had previously written. She urged him to stay home and “write our books” while she worked as a screenwriter to support them and Sanford’s father.

She was “one of the most skilled screenwriters of her time,” Sanford said, and “she gave me a liberty that few writers enjoy. . . . Even more important to me was the warmth she imparted to the very air I breathed until the day she died.”

Other Times Book Prize winners Friday night were:

* W.G. Sebald, in fiction, for “The Rings of Saturn,” published by New Directions. Judges praised Sebald’s “juxtaposition of immediate fleeting phenomena . . . with occasions of immense historical weight” as “the way reality comes to us in contemporary experience.”

* Philip Gourevitch, in current interest, for “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Judges said Gourevitch “goes behind the shocking headlines and explains how genocide . . . can happen while the world watches and shrugs.”

* Roy Porter, in history, for “The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity,” published by W.W. Norton. The judges said: “In lucid and graceful language, Roy Porter has written a sweeping history of humanity’s struggle for survival and self-understanding through medicine.”

* Alice Notley, in poetry, for “Mysteries of Small Houses,” published by Penguin Books. The judges called it: “An extraordinary accomplishment . . . powerful, deeply compelling . . . both intimate and historical . . . fearless and innovative. She is truly an American original.”

* Douglas Starr, in science and technology, for “Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce,” published by Alfred A. Knopf. The judges: “A gripping page-turner, a significant contribution to the history of medicine and technology and a cautionary tale. Meticulously reported and exhaustively documented.”

* Joan Bauer, in young adult fiction--a new category this year--for “Rules of the Road,” published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The judges: “Writing with genuine warmth and ready wit, Joan Bauer illuminates the twists and turns of a cross-country journey that starts in a shoe store and ends in revelations about compassion, pluck and the human spirit. Peopled with unforgettable characters.”

In addition, the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, named for the founder of the book prize program, who served as Times book editor from 1978 to 1985, was presented to C.S. Godshalk, author of “Kalimantaan,” published by Henry Holt.

The judges said, “No novelist has engaged the immensely complex subject of British colonialism in the Pacific, specifically in Borneo, with finer attention to human character in an exotic, magical, lushly beautiful and terrifying natural setting, with greater precision in regard to matters of love, sex, war, murder, disease and imperial empire.”

Three judges in each category decide on the Times Book Prizes. Most are published writers; none is a current Times employee. Each prize carries with it a citation and $1,000.

The schedule of events and a list of participating authors for this weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books are available on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/festival