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National Book Award: Winners, Finalists, and Longlisted Titles

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National Book Award Medals

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 1993

Finalist – Nonfiction
W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race

W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race

by David Levering Lewis

Buy at Amazon
Holt Paperbacks (Dec 15, 1994)
Nonfiction, Paperback, 752 pages
ISBN: 9780805035681Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
Book Description:

This monumental biography eight years in the research and writing treats the early and middle phases of a long and intense career: a crucial fifty-year period that demonstrates how Du Bois changed forever the way Americans think about themselves.
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