National Book Critics Circle Award 1970s: A decade of winners

The 1970s was a pivotal decade for American letters, and nowhere is that shift more evident than in the winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award. This was a period when the critical establishment began wrestling seriously with voices and perspectives that had long been marginalized in literary institutions. E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, which won the fiction prize in 1975, epitomized the era’s appetite for experimental storytelling that blended historical fact with imaginative reconstruction, while Toni Morrison’s landmark Song of Solomon, honored in 1977, announced the arrival of a major literary force whose work would reshape the American canon itself. The decade also saw the Critics Circle embracing ambitious work across all categories—from Susan Sontag’s influential On Photography (1977) to Maxine Hong Kingston’s revolutionary The Woman Warrior (1976), a hybrid work that defied easy categorization and opened new possibilities for memoir and identity narrative.

What strikes any reader surveying this decade is how the NBCC Award—one of the most prestigious recognitions a book can receive—seemed to recognize that literature was becoming more plural, more diverse, more willing to challenge conventional forms. The criticism category, in particular, flourished with intellectually rigorous works like Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels (1979), suggesting that readers and critics were hungry for scholarship that could illuminate both historical moments and contemporary concerns. Poetry remained a stronghold of the award’s prestige, with Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell among those recognized, yet even there the decade showed movement toward greater stylistic range and accessibility.

Below, we’ve gathered the complete roster of National Book Critics Circle Award winners from 1970-1979, organized by year and category. Whether you’re rediscovering these landmarks or encountering them for the first time, this collection offers a fascinating window into what serious readers valued during one of the most transformative decades in modern American literature.