National Book Award: Winners, Finalists, and Longlisted Titles
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The mission of the National Book Foundation is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America. National Book Awards are given in five categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature.
Here we highlight the winners of African descent. The first African-American writer to win a National Book Award was Ralph Ellison, in 1953, for Invisible Man.
One Book Honored by the National Book Foundation in 1964
The Fire Next Time
21-time BLK Bestseller, Adult Nonfiction (Paperback)
- A 2024 National Bestselling Book – Adult Nonfiction (Paperback)
- 9 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- Selected for 3 Book Club Reading Lists
- National Book Award Honor 1964
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two letters, written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as
sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle all presented in searing, brilliant prose,
The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.