‘Cold Mountain’ Wins National Fiction Award

In a year that saw the publication of several big new novels by major American writers, a first novel about the Civil War that had seemed to come out of nowhere onto the best-seller lists, “Cold Mountain” (Atlantic Monthly Press), by Charles Frazier, won the National Book Award for fiction last week.

Joseph Ellis, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, won the nonfiction prize for “American Sphinx: the Character of Thomas Jefferson”(Advance Publications).

Frazier’s “Cold Mountain” is the story of a wounded Civil War soldier and his perilous journey home through the devastated landscape of the South. The judges cited it for being a novel “in which we again see war breeding craziness, a story like ‘The Odyssey,’ about attempting to heal by going home.”

“Cold Mountain” won over Don DeLillo’s “Underworld.”

Also nominated for the fiction prize were: Diane Johnson’s “Le Divorce,” a Jamesian comedy of manners set in Paris about a young American woman and an unsolved murder; “Echo House,” the latest novel of Washington political life from Ward Just, which spans 90 years of one family’s history; and “The Puttermesser Papers,” by Cynthia Ozick, about Ruth Puttermesser, a learned bureaucrat who, through the machinations of a golem, becomes mayor of New York.

The runners-up for the nonfiction award included “The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade,” essays on the undertaking trade, by Thomas Lynch, who is an undertaker and a poet, and Jamaica Kincaid’s “My Brother,” a frank account of her brother’s death from AIDS. Among the finalists were two biographies: Sam Tanenhaus’s “Whittaker Chambers,” about the man whose testimony sent Alger Hiss to prison, and “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,” by David Kertzer, a professor of anthropology and history at Brown University in Rhode Island, about the 1858 kidnapping by the Vatican of a Jewish child.