White House Announces the 2010 National Humanities Medals

The White House announced today the ten recipients of the 2010 National Humanities Medals—and it reads like a Who’s Who of The Library of America’s advisors, editors, and authors.

• Widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of American Studies, Daniel Aaron taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard, was a co-founder of The Library of America, and is currently a Director Emeritus of the LOA.
• Adams University Professor of History at Harvard University, Bernard Bailyn is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of numerous books, including The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. He edited the two-volume The Debate on the Constitution, one of the best-selling LOA volumes of all time.
• Historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun (who recently turned 103 years old) is the author of dozens of books, including From Dawn to Decadence. His writing appears in the LOA collections Baseball: A Literary Anthology and The Lincoln Anthology.
• Poet, novelist, story writer, and environmentalist Wendell Berry is also included in two LOA collections: American Food Writing and American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau.
• Joyce Carol Oates, author of more than 50 novels, is the editor of the recent LOA collection of Shirley Jackson’s novels and stories. Her own writing appears in American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now.
• Arnold Rampersad, who has written critically acclaimed biographies of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Ralph Ellison, served as editor for the two-volume LOA edition of Richard Wright’s writings.
• The Library of America recently printed the sixth volume of the definitive edition of Philip Roth’s novels and stories; the seventh volume will appear this fall.
• Gordon S. Wood, Professor Emeritus of History at Brown University and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution and Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic 1789–1815, edited the forthcoming two-volume LOA edition of John Adams: Revolutionary Writings.

Stanley Nider Katz, president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, and Roberto González Echevarría, the Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale University, will also receive National Humanities Medals.

Also announced were the National Medals of Arts; among the ten recipients are Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, and former Poet Laureate Donald Hall—two of whose poems were included in American Religious Poems, the Library of America anthology edited by Harold Bloom.

The awards ceremony is planned for tomorrow. Congratulations to all the winners!