Annal:2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson
- 2001 NBCC–Biography winner
- 2001 LATimes–Biography finalist
- 2001 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 22.51
A heroic, brilliantly detailed portrait of the biographer as artist.
James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson is the most celebrated of all biographies, acknowledged as one of the greatest and most entertaining books in the English language. Yet Boswell himself was regarded by his contemporaries as a man of no judgment and condemned by posterity as a lecher and a drunk. How could such a fool have written such a book?
Boswell’s “presumptuous task” was his biography of Johnson. Adam Sisman traces the friendship between Boswell and his great mentor, one…
- 2001 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.51
One of America’s most brilliant fiction writers offers her first book in a decade—a heartbreaking memoir of girlhood.
Born in the 1920s to nomadic and bohemian parents, Paula Fox is left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage, then cared for by a poor yet cultivated minister in upstate New York. But her parents, as always, soon resurface. Her handsome father is a hard-drinking screenwriter who is, for young Paula, “part ally, part betrayer.” Her mother is given to icy bursts of temper that punctuate a deep indifference. How, Fox wonders, is this woman “enough of an…
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña
- 2001 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.51
The story of how four young bohemians on the make - Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez, and Richard Fariña - converged in Greenwich Village, fell into love, and invented a sound and a style that are one of the most lasting legacies of the 1960s
When Bob Dylan, age twenty-five, wrecked his motorcycle on the side of a road near Woodstock in 1966 and dropped out of the public eye, he was recognized as a genius, a youth idol, and the authentic voice of the counterculture: and Greenwich Village, where he first made his mark as a protest singer with an acid wit and a…
Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet
Eugene Walter, Katherine Clark, George Plimpton
- 2001 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.51
“I’ve had a great life, and it all happened because I didn’t plan any of it.” — Eugene Walter
Eugene Walter was the best-known man you’ve never heard of. In his 76 years, he ate of “the ripened heart of life,” to quote a letter from Isak Dinesen, one of his many illustrious friends. He savored the porch life of his native Mobile, Alabama, in the 1920s and ’30s. He stumbled into the Greenwich Village art scene in late-1940s New York. He was a ubiquitous presence in Paris’s expatriate café society in the 1950s, where he was part of the Paris Review at its…
The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin – A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal
- 2001 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.51
In this provocative and unsettling look at the consequences of America’s puritanical “need to punish,” Barry Werth explores the tragic story of one of America’s great literary minds whose life and career were shattered by the “Pink Scare.”
Newton Arvin (1900-1963) was one of America’s most esteemed literary critics, admired by Edmund Wilson and Lillian Hellman, and mentor to Truman Capote. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and in 1951, won the National Book Award for his biography of Herman Melville. As a scholar and writer, Arvin focused on the…
