Buck Biography Nominated

Sun., Feb. 2, 1997

Phildelphia Inquirer

“Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography” (Cambridge), a highly praised life of the Nobel Prize-winning author by University of Pennsylvania English professor Peter Conn, is among the 25 books nominated by the National Book Critics Circle as the best of 1996.

Other biography nominations are: Frank McCourt for “Angela’s Ashes” (Scribner); Alan Shapiro for “The Last Happy Occasion” (Chicago); Jan Swafford for “Charles Ives: A Life in Music” (Norton); and David Hadju for “Lush Life: A Bio of Billy Strayhorn” (FSG).

Nominated in fiction are “About Schmidt” (Knopf) by Louis Begley; “The Autobiography of My Mother” (FSG) by Jamaica Kincaid; “From Bondage” (St. Martin’s) by Henry Roth; “Women in Their Beds” (Counterpoint) by Gina Berriault; and “Dancing After Hours” (Knopf) by Andre Dubus.

Nominated for general nonfiction are “Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and Other Indestructibles” (S&S) by David Denby; “Bad Land” (Pantheon) by Jonathan Raban; “Ashes to Ashes” (Knopf) by Richard Kluger; “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (Knopf) by Daniel Goldhagen; and “The Middle East: A Brief History” (Scribner) by Bernard Lewis.

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