The Ethnicization of Veteran America: Larry Heinemann, Toni Morrison, and Military Whiteness after Vietnam

To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming.

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

To the astonishment of book critics, in November 1987, Larry Heinemann’s Vietnam War novel Paco’s Story (1986) won the National Book Award for Fiction over Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). When Heinemann’s name was announced during the black-tie event at Manhattan’s Pierre Hotel, the audience of authors, editors, and booksellers was silent at first, caught off-guard by the decision. Among the nominees, Philip Roth’s The Counterlife (1986) had been considered the only real contender to Beloved. Morrison had invited three tables of friends and associates, and they, like the rest of the ballroom, were shocked to hear this unfamiliar name. Heinemann, a middle-aged, second-time novelist from Chicago, took the stage and stated the obvious: “This is an interesting surprise” (qtd. in McDowell).

Heinemann’s win was met with immediate criticism as another instance of the book industry serving the interests and reinforcing the status of the white male author. Two months later, forty-eight black writers signed a statement in The New York Times Book Review that celebrated Morrison’s writing and condemned the “oversight and harmful whimsy” that had denied her “the keystone honors of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize.” The statement ran alongside a letter from June Jordan and Houston Baker in which they noted that James Baldwin, who had died weeks earlier, had likewise never received these “keystones” and lamented that they could not feel confident that “such national neglect will not occur again, and then again” (“Black Writers”). Though James Davison Hunter would not coin the term culture wars for another four years, that is the framework in which the 1987 National Book Award for Fiction is now understood, as having less to do with Morrison’s and Heinemann’s novels than with the New Right’s assault on an alleged “racial favoritism” in the arts.

James English has offered an alternative account of Heinemann’s win, casting it within a long-standing conflict among artists, critics, and the administrators of cultural awards. English sees awards as agents of what he calls “capital intraconversion,” through which cultural value is “cashed in” for economic fortunes and economic fortunes are exchanged for cultural recognition (10). He argues that institutions such as the Academy Awards and the Pulitzer Prizes are among the most effective instruments for determining the rates of exchange between these two fields—and regulating who can and cannot exchange what. His observations allow us to see that when critics argue that awards are meaningless, and below art, they reinforce the belief that cultural valuation has no relation to something as crude as dollars and cents. But it does, as Jordan and Baker refused to ignore in their letter. They and their co-signees, as English writes, acknowledged “the prize for what it is—a thoroughly social, economic, and (racist) political instrument—and [they credited] it with real, even potentially decisive power in determining long-term literary valuations” (243).¹ For violating the established decorum of the cultural award, Jordan and Baker were criticized for contributing to what Christopher Hitchens dismissed as a wider “thirst for trophies” that he and others saw as degrading the arts. These criticisms escalated when Beloved did win the Pulitzer Prize later that year.² The force with which Morrison’s defenders celebrated her work and the anger that their directness roused suggests the award’s place as a signal event in a shifting literary market—and in the nation’s evolving and tangled understanding of race in the post–civil rights era.³

Left out of the conversation surrounding the 1987 National Book Awards is...