Living Canon

National Book Critics Circle Award 1977: Complete list of winners

The 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award ceremony brought together a remarkable collection of voices that would come to define American letters for decades to come. That year’s winners represented the full spectrum of what serious readers valued: Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking On Photography, which revolutionized how we think about images in our culture; Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, a triumphant novel that announced her arrival as one of our most essential writers; Walter Jackson Bate’s meticulous biography Samuel Johnson; and Robert Lowell’s introspective final collection Day by Day. These weren’t just celebrated books—they were cultural touchstones that shifted conversations about what literature could accomplish.

What makes the 1977 NBCC Award winners particularly striking is how they capture a specific moment of literary renaissance and candor. Morrison’s win was a watershed for African American fiction in mainstream literary culture, while Sontag’s critical meditation on photography felt urgently contemporary, wrestling with how images were reshaping modern consciousness. Lowell’s deeply personal poetry offered readers the opposite impulse—inward reflection rather than outward analysis—yet both approaches earned equal recognition. The breadth of these selections speaks to the National Book Critics Circle Award’s commitment to honoring the year’s most significant contributions across multiple genres, whether through criticism, fiction, poetry, or nonfiction.

These four books, taken together, represent an especially fertile year for American publishing. Below, you’ll find the complete list of 1977’s winners across all categories.

Criticism

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry