On 4 May, the National Book Foundation -- sponsor of the National Book Awards -- will launch a Web site in partnership with BookWire aimed at building a bridge between the cultures of the literati and the digerati. The site will be accessible next week at www.nationalbook.org, and via links on the BookWire site.
The site will include a section called "Windows on the Writing Life," offering online reading circles and webcasts of interviews at events in four cities with such authors as Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Levine, and E. L. Doctorow. The site's most substantive addition to American letters, however, will be made in June, when the NBF will port to the Web a never-published treasure trove of letters, interviews, and speeches by National Book Award winners going back to 1950.
Included in that collection will be a speech by James Laughlin, the founder of the highly influential New Directions press, groundbreaking publisher of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and other modernist writers; an address by Gwendolyn Brooks on her influences as an author; and a talk by Eudora Welty. Correspondence by authors who have been involved in the NBF's numerous outreach and educational efforts -- such as dispatches from a Native American reservation by poet Donald Hall -- will also be published for the first time on the site.
"Brooks' speech was heard by only 500 people in the Plaza Hotel. Until now, you had to be in the room, and part of the inner sanctum, to hear these," says Neil Baldwin, executive director of the NBF. "Now that's all going to change, and that's very healthy for us."
The ambition of the new site, Baldwin says, is to establish a "continuum" between the tradition of the awards -- which give US$10,000 prizes each year in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and young people's literature -- and the online world. Baldwin believes the depth of resources offered on the site will surprise readers.
"You'll come because you like Grace Paley stories, but then you'll find out how much Paley has to say about working with young people. People will visit the site because of the awards, but what they're going to discover is context," Baldwin explains.
The awards were initiated by a consortium of publishing groups. Previous years' winners have represented a broad spectrum of American wordsmithing, from celebrated literary lights like Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, Ralph Ellison, and Flannery O'Connor; to figures from popular culture such as Julia Child and Pauline Kael; to less-remembered authors like Herbert Kubly, Catherine Drinker Bowen, and Isaiah Trunk. As part of the "Windows on the Writing Life" program, eight contemporary winners will be asked to reflect on the books that changed their lives.
Before the National Book Foundation took over sponsorship of the awards in 1989, they had fallen into disarray, bounced around by a succession of industry sponsors from the American Booksellers' Association to the Association of American Publishers. The once-prestigious awards had become "an orphan of American lit," Baldwin recalls.
With the establishment of the NBF, the awards found a permanent home, and the Foundation expanded its role to include outreach programs like Family Literacy, which teaches teenagers how to uncover and write down the histories of their ancestors, and Settlement House, an educational program for young people in New York City.
Jenna Schnuer, the senior editor of BookWire, acknowledges that there has been wariness in some sectors of the publishing industry -- nervous about copyright-infringement issues and competition -- to embrace the online world. Sites like the NBF's, however, signal an end to that era, she says.
"People in the publishing industry don't have the technological knowledge, so it was easy to be fearful," Schnuer observes. "But I can't see a new industry that has created more books on paper than the Web."
Baldwin, who is 50, says he was encouraged to plunge into the bitstreams by the online literacy of his teenage children.
"My daughter comes home from school and she doesn't call her friends. They all email each other," Baldwin says. "I didn't want to be a Luddite about this."
