Browsers’ Prize: An Introduction to the National Book Award 1963, Revisited

Remember bookstores? Weren’t they great? Do you recall that some bookstores (the best ones, in fact), sold, almost exclusively, books that were not new? Do you remember what it was like to shuffle through their aisles in non-alphabetical order, your head tilted achingly in order to read the vertical writing on the spines? Do you remember that many books would not fit on the sagging shelves, so they had to be stacked on the floor or up near the ceiling? Remember the sleeping cat? And because the books were not new and not even very well organized, do you remember what it was like to stumble across something genuinely surprising? And wasn’t that the best part of the whole experience, this feeling of surprise, or perhaps even the anticipation of a potential surprise lurking somewhere in the dark and dusty aisles?

Serving as a judge for the National Book Award 1963, Revisited, a project now in its fourth year, was not unlike this experience of searching for not-new books. I think I can safely speak for my fellow jurors—Ramona Ausubel, Barb Johnson, Manuel Muñoz, and Marisa Silver—when I say that we were not motivated by a sense of justice (the need to redress literary wrongs) or a sense of exhaustive and rigorous evaluation (the need to select the very best book of the year, whatever that might mean), but rather a sense of curiosity. We came not to avenge or even to adjudicate; we came to browse! (Though it must be stated that browsing, for professional writers and readers, is serious business, indeed.) We wandered, perhaps a bit haphazardly, through the dimly lit aisle of 1962, hoping for a surprise. I am happy to report that we found one.

We began, my fellow judges and I, with a list of more than twenty-five books published in 1962. It was not a thin year for fiction—the list included work by William Faulkner, Philip Roth, Richard Yates, Kurt Vonnegut, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Katherine Anne Porter, John Updike, Shirley Jackson, Edward Abbey, Ellen Douglas, Jack Kerouac, Dawn Powell, Thomas Berger, Ken Kesey, Ray Bradbury, John O’Hara, and Reynolds Price, as well as J. F. Powers, who won the original 1963 National Book Award for Morte D’Urban. Each of us then selected one book to create a list of five finalists (in alphabetical order by author):

• Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding

• Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

• Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

• Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (original finalist)

• John Updike, Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (original finalist)

The members of the panel then carefully considered each of the finalists, generating their own loose rankings and notes, after which we began an e-mail discussion aimed at achieving a rough consensus and a winner. Though some of us wished that we might convene someplace real—with a real jukebox and real sticky floors—our virtual discussions were nevertheless lively, respectful, and engaged. We did not see eye to eye to eye to eye to eye on all matters, but the process was perhaps most interesting and illuminating when we did not. Almost immediately we were up against the thorny questions that all judges of artistic merit encounter: How do you compare two (or more) vastly different works? To what extent do you reward ambition and originality, measured against skillful execution of more conventional methods? Do you penalize for caricature or stereotype in a book that is fifty years old? To what extent do you consider the artist’s career? How do you weigh heartfelt passion for a book against a nodding intellectual respect? Or how do you weigh an extremely negative response against a shoulder shrug? And how, as a group, do you designate a winner? While you might not want to grant an award based on the fervent advocacy of a judge or two, you also might not want to grant the award to every judge’s third-place selection. Should a book that is detested...