Wolfe Bypassed in Book Awards

Unmoved by bestseller lists and magazine covers, National Book Award voters bypassed Tom Wolfe and gave the fiction prize to the relatively unknown Alice McDermott. She was cited for “Charming Billy,” the story of an Irish family and community in New York. McDermott has never had anything like the broad following of Wolfe, whose novel “A Man in Full” was the year’s biggest publishing event. The big winner announced in New York was the publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which received prizes in three of the four categories. Besides McDermott, the publisher’s writers getting awards were Edward Ball for nonfiction and Louis Sachar for young people’s literature.