Tuesday, March 1, 2011

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.
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!

3 comments:

  1. The administration of the first African-American POTUS in American history, bestowing a National Medal of the Arts upon the author of the classic novel "To Kill A Mockingbird", a book that has humanized the evils of racism for millions of school children and others in our contiguous borders -- it doesn't get any more sublime or surreal than that (surreal for Ms. Lee, I'm sure).

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  2. This is great news for the Library of America, but the National Humanities Metal should go to the other co-founder of the Library of America, Cheryl Hurley, as well as to Daniel Aaron.

    MSH

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  3. "Medal", Mary, not "metal", two different things altogether.

    And I share your sentiment about Ms. Hurley and Daniel Aaron; a few years ago I came across a copy of his "Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism", a work that would most certainly have sent Joseph McCarthy into frothing-at-the-mouth fits had he not already passed by 1978 when the book was published. Interesting that "Tail Gunner Joe" hails from the same great state in the union that is once again toying with fascism on American soil.

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