With Donald Trump riding a wave of white racial fear and resentment to the White House, journalists and scholars have returned to whiteness as a framework for understanding racial and class politics in the 21st century. More than two decades later, there is much to be learned from Morrison’s reflections on the whiteness of American literature. It draws attention to the man who won that night, a 43-year-old white Vietnam vet who writes about white men at war in black vernacular English that he identifies as the language of “street folks” who address each other in “a jivey sort of way.” It draws attention to a writer who sees his own genre, war fiction, as marginalized, whose narrators lament that “war stories are out.” Morrison observes that national literatures “end up describing and inscribing what is really on the national mind” and that “the literature of the United States has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man.” That is true, as well, of Heinemann’s National Book Award–winning novel. Although Morrison’s book, which turns 25 this year, addresses the fiction of Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain and not her own or Heinemann’s, it offers a different angle on the 1987 National Book Awards. The lectures formed the basis of Morrison’s nonfiction book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and gave wider recognition to the emerging field of critical whiteness studies, which set out to examine how structural forms of racism were founded on unacknowledged beliefs about white entitlement and innocence. She made the case to her Cambridge audience that the young republic’s men of letters conceived the nation as white and free by defining it against blackness and enslavement. Three years after Heinemann’s big night, Morrison delivered the Massey Lectures at Harvard University on how white American writers had relied on ideas about blackness - what she termed an “American Africanism” - in the construction of whiteness as Americanness. ![]() ![]() Heinemann’s novel, all but forgotten, went out of print. In 2006, the Times declared it the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years. Christopher Hitchens dismissed the letter as a crude demand for Morrison to “be upgraded to prizewinner seating.” Neoconservative writer Carol Iannone bemoaned that book awards had become “less a recognition of literary achievement than some official act of reparation.” The fallout from the 1987 National Book Awards embodied the worst of the culture wars, in which the cultural left and the cultural right shared what sociologist Bethany Bryson has described as the “extraordinary premise” that “every time an English teacher put together a reading list, the future of a nation hung in the balance.” Beloved went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and become a standard in American high school and college English classrooms. Liberal and conservative critics fired back. “I came here for the party.”įorty-eight black writers signed a statement in The New York Times Book Review condemning the “oversight and harmful whimsy” that had left Morrison, by then the author of five acclaimed novels, with neither a National Book Award nor a Pulitzer Prize. “I didn’t come here expecting to win,” Heinemann later admitted. Morrison had invited three tables of friends and associates to the National Book Award gala, and they, like the rest of the audience, were shocked to see Heinemann, a little-known white writer from Chicago, take the stage and receive a bronze statue for his slender war novel. Morrison had been nominated for Beloved (1987), a novel that secured her status, Margaret Atwood declared in a New York Times review that fall, as the “pre-eminent American novelist” and would be cited by the Swedish Academy six years later when it awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature. ![]() The announcement that Heinemann had won for his Vietnam War novel Paco’s Story (1986) astonished the ballroom of authors, editors, and booksellers because the nominees included two of the biggest names in American literature, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth. ON NOVEMBER 9, 1987, at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, Larry Heinemann received the National Book Award for Fiction.
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