Annal:1980 National Book Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 1980. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1980 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1978 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.3
This is the life and times of T.S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields—a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes—even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with “lunacy and sorrow”; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries—with more than ten million copies in print—this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous…
Sophie's Choice: A Novel
- 1980 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1979 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.3
“[One morning] in the early spring, I woke up with the remembrance of a girl I’d once known, Sophie. It was a very vivid half-dream, half-revelation, and all of a sudden I realized that hers was a story I had to tell.” That very day, William Styron began writing the first chapter of Sophie’s Choice.
First published in 1979, this complex and ambitious novel opens with Stingo, a young southerner, journeying north in 1947 to become a writer. It leads us into his intellectual and emotional entanglement with his neighbors in a Brooklyn rooming house:…
- 1980 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1980 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1979 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 22.3
In what is arguably his greatest book, written in 1979, America’s most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America’s prisons who—after robbing two men and killing them in cold blood—insisted on dying for his crime. To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death.
Norman Mailer tells Gilmore’s story—and those of the men and women caught up in his procession toward the firing squad—with implacable authority, steely…
Endless Love: A Novel
- 1980 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.3
One of the most celebrated novels of its time, Endless Love remains perhaps the most powerful novel ever written about young love. Riveting, compulsively readable, and ferociously sexual, Endless Love tells the story of David Axelrod and his overwhelming love for Jade Butterfield.
David’s and Jade’s lives are consumed with each other; their rapport, their desire, their sexuality take them further than they understand. And when Jade’s father suddenly banishes David from the house, he fantasizes the forgiveness his rescue of the family will bring…
- 1980 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.3
The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this novel with a stunning, unforgettable experience. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni’s Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses—and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land.
- 1980 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1980 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1979 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.3
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff.
At Lonoff’s, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff’s and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of…
- 1980 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.3
In the stories that make up this collection, Bowles creates a world in which the extreme situations the characters find themselves in move relentlessly towards their logical, yet disturbing conclusions.
Violet Clay: A Novel
- 1980 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.3
Violet Clay had come to New York City from Charleston to take the art world by storm. But nine years, many affairs, and thousands of drinks later, the reality of her shadow life is made clear when she is fired from her job as a freelance illustrator. That same day, she hears that her beloved Uncle Ambrose, an unsuccessful writer, has shot himself.
As Violet collects the shattered pieces of her uncle’s life, she is forced to face herself and her own tattered dreams. And what she discovers is that she has just been going through the motions of living. She’s not…
- 1980 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.3
Stories that trace the decline and fall of a marriage, a history made up of the happiness of growing children and shared life, and the sadness of growing estrangement and the misunderstandings of love.
