Living Canon

National Book Award 1960: Complete list of winners

Robert Lowell’s Life Studies claimed the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960, marking a watershed moment for American verse. Lowell’s collection represented a radical departure from the formalist poetry that had dominated the 1950s—instead of the carefully wrought masks and historical conceits that defined his earlier work, Life Studies opened the door to raw, autobiographical confession. The book’s unflinching examination of family trauma, mental illness, and personal failure struck readers as shockingly modern, even dangerous, with poems like “Skunk Hour” and the stunning prose sequence “91 Revere Street” laying bare the inner lives of the American bourgeoisie. The National Book Award, established in 1950 to honor the most distinguished literary work by an American author, had recognized groundbreaking poetry before, but Lowell’s win signaled that the literary establishment was ready to embrace a more intimate, psychologically probing mode of expression.

The 1960 National Book Award came at a pivotal moment in postwar American letters, when the younger generation of poets was beginning to challenge the New Critical orthodoxy that had reigned over American universities. Life Studies would go on to become a touchstone for the confessional poetry movement, influencing generations of writers who followed Lowell in mining their own emotional and psychological depths for literary material. The recognition from the National Book Awards cemented Lowell’s position as one of the most important American poets of his era, even as his radical honesty would continue to provoke both admiration and controversy throughout his career.

Poetry