Book awards grow like weeds, but that is not a bad thing. Acclaim (or at least recognition) is a way to find out about the notable, the rare, the special in the vast flood of books. Over the years we have discovered that some awards are more trustworthy or more relevant to our customers than others. The award winners and sometimes the nominees are featured here. A quick explanation:
the Caldecott Medal is intended for the best illustrated children’s book,
the Newbery Medal is intended for the best young adult book (flexible in definition),
the National Book Award is given by the National Book Foundation,
the National Book Critics’ Circle Award by a professional association of American book review editors and critics (originally the Algonquin Round Table),
the Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America,
the Hugo Award by the yearly World Science Fiction Convention (professional affiliation not required),
the Nebula by the Science Fiction Writers of America,
the Spur Award by the Western Writers of America,
the Booker Prize by a changing committee of eminent UK writers and critics,
and the Pulitzer Prize by Columbia University as endowed by newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer.
As a reminder, the Nobel Prize for Literature is for a lifetime body of work, not for a single work in a particular year, as are all the others featured here.
The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
Winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro -- the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness.
In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. Locke also received a cosmopolitan, aesthetic education through his travels in continental Europe, where he came to appreciate the beauty of art and experienced a freedom unknown to him in the United States. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America and his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism. In the process he looked to Africa to find the proud and beautiful roots of the race. Shifting the discussion of race from politics and economics to the arts, he helped establish the idea that Black urban communities could be crucibles of creativity. Stewart explores both Locke's professional and private life, including his relationships with his mother, his friends, and his white patrons, as well as his lifelong search for love as a gay man.
Stewart's thought-provoking biography recreates the worlds of this illustrious, enigmatic man who, in promoting the cultural heritage of Black people, became -- in the process -- a New Negro himself.