1966

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

By Peter Matthiessen

Original Publisher: Random House

Current Publisher: Vintage

Fiction Finalists That Year:

• Jesse Hill Ford for The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones
• Peter Matthiessen for At Play in the Fields of the Lord
• James Merrill for The (Diblos) Notebook
• Flannery O'Connor for Everything that Rises Must Converge
• Harry Petrakis for Pericles on 31st Street

Fiction Winner That Year: Katherine Anne Porter for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

Fiction Judges That Year: Paul Horgan, J.F. Powers, Glenway Wescott

The Year in Literature:

• The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
• Shmuel Agnon and Nelly Sachs won the Nobel Prize for literature.

More Information: Matthiessen won the National Book Award three times: in 1979 and 1980 for The Snow Leopard, and in 2008 for Shadow Country. He was also a Finalist in 1973 with Eliot Porter for The Tree Where Man Was Born/The African Experience.

Links: www.nbafictionblog.org/nba-winning-books-blog/2008.html