Christopher Merrill
2002 Nonfiction Panel Chair

L to R: Bob Shacochis, Fiction Panel Chair; Han Nolan, Young People's Literature Panel Chair; Dave Smith, Poetry Panel Chair; Christopher Merrill, Nonfiction Panel Chair. Photo credit: Robin Platzer/Twin Images.

Thank you. I'm particularly grateful that Ruth Stone just won the National Book Award because my wife and I bought our wedding clothes from her daughter Phoebe a long time ago, so it feels like it's all come back home.

I want to express my gratitude to Neil Baldwin and his staff at the National Book Foundation for the rigor and guidance and the good humor they brought to the task of marshalling all these books into our hands and giving us a way to think about books in the deepest possible manner.

The experience of reading nearly 400 books of non-fiction in a matter of months may be likened to the practice of fattening a goose for the production of foie gras. And if some writers are tempted to serve up this panel of judges to their editors and agents, family and friends, I must admit, that this would be a suitable reward or punishment for our gluttony. Indeed, my fellow judges, Anthony Brandt, Gail Buckley, Mary Carr, and Michael Kinsley and I took a kind of guilty pleasure reading so many good books. It was our task to judge the literary merits of works whose primary allegiance is to fact: researched, remembered or observed. And what we noted was the astonishing variety of subjects for our consideration. No corner of American experience, it sometimes seemed, had gone unexamined, from manners to murder, and everything in between. In histories and biographies, in memoirs, in works of political analysis, travel, science and nature, writers are synthesizing vast amounts of information and argument in traditional or innovative narrative forms, and the books that made the deepest impressions on us were the ones that revealed some part of our world in a bold, new way, explaining how things work, for example, or recounting journeys into hitherto unexplored or forgotten realms of geography and experience. Or meditating on an idea that may one day become central to our identity and our destiny as a people and a nation.

This is a rich period for biography. I feel as I have come to know scores of fascinating men and women in the privacy of my study, as well as history. And if anything was missing from the picture of contemporary letters we assumed book by book, it was perhaps sustained attention to other lands and lives distant from our own. "I have traveled much in Concord," Thoreau wrote; in these last months I read many pages that allowed me to travel much in America, a place of extraordinary beauty and strangeness, which is only fitting. This is, after all, the National Book Award, and the Winner of this year's prize is the writer who, in our view, best plumbed the depths or our complicated experience: Robert Caro. Read Robert Caro's acceptance speech.