Colum McCann wins fiction prize

NEW YORK — Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin," a novel about daring, luck and mortality in 1970s New York, won the fiction prize Wednesday night at the 60th annual National Book Awards.

McCann praised the generosity of U.S. fiction and of the American people and dedicated his prize to a fellow Irish American, "good old" Frank McCourt.

"I think he's dancing upstairs," McCann said of the "Angela's Ashes" memoirist, who died last summer.

T.J. Stiles' biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, "The First Tycoon," was the nonfiction winner and Keith Waldrop's "Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy" won for poetry. The young people's literature award went to Phillip Hoose's "Claudette Colvin," based on the true story of an early civil-rights heroine, who joined Hoose on the stage. He thanked her for letting him relate her story, which he had feared would vanish "under history's rug."

"We have saved that story," Hoose said of Colvin, 70, who as a teenager was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, months before a similar incident made Rosa Parks a symbol of defiance.

Stories of oppressors and underdogs, of rich and poor, were common themes among Wednesday night's nominees.

Finalists included Bonnie Jo Campbell's short fiction about hard times in Michigan, "American Salvage," and Daniyal Mueenuddin's tales of the class divide in Pakistan, "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders."

Money, or lack of it, also shaded McCann's book and two other nominated novels: Marcel Theroux's "Far North" and Jayne Anne Phillips' "Lark & Termite."

A special prize, voted on by the public, was given to "The Complete Stories" of Flannery O'Connor as the best of all fiction winners in the awards' 60-year history. Finalists included story collections by Eudora Welty and John Cheever and Ralph Ellison's novel "Invisible Man."

A lifetime achievement award was presented — by actress Joanne Woodward — to Gore Vidal, 84, melancholy and in a wheelchair, his baritone weak as he lamented the war in Afghanistan, longed for the presidency of the "gallant" Franklin Roosevelt and looked downward, as he called out to his fallen (and unforgiven) conservative enemy, the late William F. Buckley.

"Usually, I let him out at midnight," Vidal said of Buckley, with whom he feuded for decades.