The National Book Foundation's 2008 Literarian Award for
Outstanidng Service to the Ameircan Literary Community
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Barney's speech
Thank you, Marty, and thank you, Harold, and the National Book Foundation. I am deeply touched by this special award, and it has a particular resonance for me. In 1950, the National Book Award conferred its first award on Nelson Algren, who, even though he wasn't born there, was a son of Chicago.
I too am a son of Chicago - and there in 1935 in the 8th grade I, along with a fellow student, Haskell Wexler, made up a journal we named The Anti-Everything. Perhaps no title can be totally accurate – but this one certainly was meant to be a direct challenge to censorship and fascism.
Five years later, in 1940 at Swarthmore, I handed in my English term paper on Henry Miller. There was no doubt about it, he was my Anti-Everything personified. And the happiest moment of my career at Grove was coming out of the Chicago courthouse in a blizzard after the judge had ruled in our favor on Tropic of Cancer. Miller had been vindicated. It was a time of great hope – John F. Kennedy was President.
Printed on the cover and the first two pages of Evergreen Review, July-August 1962, was a statement signed by over 200 leading writers, editors, and publishers, which said in part, "We, the undersigned, strongly endorse Samuel B. Epstein's defense of the freedom to read in his historic decision in the Tropic of Cancer case in Chicago. Judge Epstein, by stating that the 'right to free utterance becomes a useless privilege when the freedom to read is restricted or denied,'
The National Book Award is about celebrating the best of American literature, and necessarily the freedom to read what we want is an essential part of that program. That principle—that no one has the right to tell us what we can and cannot read—is one that's always been dear to me.
Let me just add that it's an additional privilege to receive this award in a year when America magnificently, impossibly, turns its gaze back to a progressive agenda. At the point of uttermost despair, in the midst of a prevailing economic, moral and environmental sense of doom, a dynamic leader has appeared--and for the first time in recent memory, I'm not thinking of renouncing my American passport, and asserting my Irish citizenship. The country looks like it may emerge from these dark decades with a new and uplifting agenda. Perhaps publishing, that grand, battered, and essential institution that I've worked in for more than half a century now, will go through a similar renewal. I hope so; I think so.
Thank you very much.
 Barney and Morgan Entrekin, president Grove/Atlantic |
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