February 28, 1972, Page 38 The New York Times Archives

After two years of sizzling literary polemics, the selection system of the National Book Awards has undergone yet another reorganization and the number of prizes has been expanded from 8 to 10.

For the first time in the 23‐year history of the awards, there will be a prize for books on contemporary affairs and one each for biography and history, which in the past were combined into one category.

The changes were announced yesterday by Roger L. Stevens, chairman of the National Book Committee, which administers the awards. It is a nonprofit group of private citizens founded in 1954 “to foster the wiser and wider use of books.”

Innovation Abandoned

Most significantly, the new selection method abandons last year's innovation of a nationwide poll of booksellers and librarians. Instead, nominations will be made by editors and critics specializing in each of the 10 categories as well as by the respective jury members.

The previous poll procedure was conceived by committee officials “to broaden the base of participation in the awards program” as a way of meeting criticism by many people in the publishing community that nominations in earlier years had been made too arbitrarily by the committee staff. But the idea ran into stiff opposition from several juries, which substituted their own nominations for the “broadly based” selections.

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A reorganized Awards Policy Committee formed after last year's controversy and headed by Mr. Stevens also included in the new juries a larger proportion of literary critics—in addition to writers and editors—and recommended that each jury make 10 final selections instead of 5 as in previous years.

“Since all awards and prizes are open to every kind of criticism, we don't think this new system is going to prove perfect,” said Robert Gottlieb, vice president of Alfred A. Knopf and a member of the committee. “But we do feel it's an improvement.”

The National Book Awards, which carry a $1,000 prize each and are among the most prestigious American literary accolades, will be announced April 11 and presented two days later at a ceremony in Alice Tully Hall. The ceremony will close a four‐day book promotion program that opens April 10 with the P.E.N. Club's 50th anniversary dinner, which has scheduled Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize‐winning poet from Chile, as its principal speaker.

Judges Are Listed

The judges who will hold, their first meetings here this week, are:

Arts and letters: Stanley Burnshaw, poet and critic; John Lahr, author of “Notes on a Cowardly Lion” and a columnist for The Village Voice; Frederick Morgan, editor of The Hudson Review.

Biography: Fawn M. Brodie, professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles; Robert Halsband, professor of English at the University of California, Riverside: Justin Kaplan, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for biography for his book “Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain.”

Contemporary Affairs: Digby Diehl, book editor of The Los Angeles Times; Harrison E. Salisbury, assistant managing editor of The New York Times and author of several books ma the Soviet Union; Gary Wills, contributing editor for Esquire and author of “Nixon Agonistes.”

History: Frank Freidel, profersor of history at Harvard University and author of multivolume biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt; Andrew Hacker, professor of history at Queens College, Peter Stansky, associate professor of British history at Stanford University.

Fiction: Joan Didion, author of two novels, “Run River” and “Play It as It Lays;” Martha Duffy, contributing editor of Time magazine; Joseph Heller, author of “Catch‐22;” Christopher Lehmann‐Haupt, daily book reviewer of The New York Times; L. Woiwode, author of “What I'm Going to Do, I Think.”

Philosophy and Religion: Anne Fremantle, teacher in the religion department of New York Unibersity and the author of more than 20 books; Herbert A. Kenny book editor of The Boston Globe; Michael Novak, associate professor of philosophy at the State University of New York, Old Westbury, LI.. and the author of “Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove.”

Poetry: Geoffrey H. Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Yale; Daryl Hine, editor of Poetry magazine; Kenneth Koch, professor of English at Columbia University; William E. Strafford, professor of English at Lewis and Clark College; May Swenson, author of “Iconographs” and “More Poems to Solve.”

The Sciences: Henry S. F. Cooper Jr., writer with The New Yorker magazine; Michael Crichton, author of “The Andromeda Strain:” Rend Duhos, professor of environmental biomedicine at Rockefeller University and author of “So Human an Animal.”

Translation: ‘William Arrowsmith professor of classics at Boston University; Patricia Blake, a specialist in Russian literature; Jerzy Kosinski, professor of prose and criticism at Yale, winner of the National Book Award for his novel “Steps;” Raja Rao, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas; Maurice Valency, Brander Matthews Professor Emeritus of Dramatic Literature at Columbia.

Children's Books: Paul Heins, editor of The Horn Book Magazine; Lore Segal, author of “Tell Me a Mizti:” Jean Stafford, winner of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for “The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford.”

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