Curated playlist
National Book Award winners
- Stephen KingA minivan hit Stephen King on a Maine road in June 1999. A dog in the back distracted the driver.
- William FaulknerWilliam Faulkner never told his daughter he had won the Nobel Prize. She heard it when the principal called her in.
- John SteinbeckJohn Steinbeck once stole bacon from a produce market to survive. He later won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature.
- Saul BellowSaul Bellow learned he had entered the U.S. illegally as a child when he tried to enlist. He became a citizen in 1941.
- Thomas PynchonThomas Pynchon told his agent in April 1964 that he had four novels in progress at once. If they came out on paper anything like they looked inside his head, he wrote, the result would be "the literary event of the millennium." The writer…
- W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died hours after reading his poems aloud in a Vienna hotel.
- Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger made a secret trip to China in July 1971. It helped end 23 years of diplomatic isolation.
- Cormac McCarthyCormac McCarthy bought a portable Olivetti Lettera 32 at a Knoxville pawn shop for $50, shortly before a trip to Europe in the early 1960s. Over the next five decades he typed about five million words on it. He kept it running by blowing…
- Margaret MitchellMargaret Mitchell used part of her unfinished novel to prop up a wobbly couch.
- Patti SmithPatti Smith, the American singer, songwriter, poet and author, lost her place in the middle of a song at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm. The date was the 10th of December 2016. She was standing in for Bob Dylan, winner of the…
- Ralph EllisonA 1967 fire destroyed more than 300 pages of Ralph Ellison's second novel. He never finished it.
- Jonathan FranzenA gate-crasher once pulled novelist Jonathan Franzen's glasses off his face. He jokingly demanded $100,000 in 2010.
- E. L. DoctorowE. L. Doctorow won the National Book Critics Circle Award three times. He mixed real and invented people.
- Allan NevinsIn 1948, historian Allan Nevins started the first institutionalized oral history program in the United States.
- George F. KennanGeorge Kennan spent decades disowning the Cold War policy he made famous. Containment, he said, was not military.
- Stephen GreenblattStephen Greenblatt was stunned when universities sought experts in "New Historicism," a phrase he coined.
- Bruce CattonBruce Catton grew up in Michigan listening to Civil War veterans, and their stories shaped his writing.
- Lewis MumfordLewis Mumford argued the clock, not the steam engine, drove the Industrial Revolution. He never finished college.
- Charles RosenPianist Charles Rosen wrote his first book because a record sleeve note embarrassed him. It won a National Book Award.