Didion, Vollmann Win National Book Awards

Joan Didion was honored Wednesday night with a National Book Award for nonfiction for “The Year of Magical Thinking,” an intimate memoir of the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, that has come to be regarded as a universal portrait of grief.

Didion, whose daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, died of an abdominal infection just as the book was going to press in late August, thanked her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, “for believing that I could sit down and write a book about something that’s not exactly about anything but personal, and thinking it could work.”

Didion’s personal book on her journey through grief has become became something of a phenomenon, and her publishers say it has vastly outsold the hardcover editions of her previous nonfiction, such as “Miami,” “Salvador” and “The White Album.”

William T. Vollmann received the fiction book award for “Europe Central,” an 800-page fictional immersion into the horrors of World War II in the Soviet Union and Germany. Other highly praised finalists for the award were E.L. Doctorow’s “The March,” a re-creation of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s devastating scorched-earth campaign through the Confederate South, and “Veronica,” by Mary Gaitskill.

“I thought I would lose,” Vollmann said, “so I didn’t prepare a speech.”

Vollmann, 46, said his preoccupation with the era began when he was in elementary school and “they showed me a film about burned corpses being pulled out of ovens.”

Later, when he learned of his German heritage, he wondered if he had relatives there “who had something to do with the Third Reich,” he said.

“I spent many years imagining how someone could have done this, whether I could have done this.... I’m very happy I don’t have to think about this anymore.”

The revered American poet W.S. Merwin, 78, won the book award for poetry for his collection “Migration.”

Norman Mailer won an honorary medal for lifetime achievement. He was introduced by Toni Morrison, who compared him and his work to the United States itself: “generous, impractical, often wrong, always engaged, mindful of and often amused by his own power.”

Mailer, who established his reputation nearly 60 years ago with the war story “The Naked and The Dead,” and later such novels as “Armies of the Night,” lamented that in a media-focused contemporary society, “the passion readers used to feel for venturing into the serious novel has withered.... The serious novel may soon be in danger.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat Generation poet and proprietor of San Francisco’s City Lights Books, also won a lifetime achievement award for his role in publishing poetry and prose and fighting legal battles over the publication of such works as Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem, “Howl.”

“He is, after all these years, still the hippest and coolest bookseller around,” said author Jessica Hagedorn as she presented him with his medal.

Jeanne Birdsall won the young people’s literature award for her debut, “The Penderwicks,” about the lives of four sisters raised by their widowed father.

The awards are sponsored by the nonprofit National Book Foundation.