March 12, 1999

The Legitimacy of Literary Awards: a Critic's Misgivings

By DAVID L. ULIN

With this week's announcement of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, I've been thinking about the first time I became aware of literary prizes. It was 1974, and I was in the seventh grade, just beginning to read with what I would later recognize as a kind of aesthetic self-consciousness -- a burgeoning sense that there was some writing out in the vast, uncharted landscape of literature that was, well, better

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