Earlier during the ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street, Don DeLillo received a lifetime achievement medal for his contributions to American letters. James Patterson was honored for his advocacy of reading and literacy.
Johnson’s award follows the Pulitzer Prize he received for his previous work, “The Orphan Master’s Son.” Both were edited by David Ebershoff, a longtime Random House executive who is leaving for a full-time writing career. Moviegoers may know him for the upcoming adaptation of his novel “The Danish Girl.”
Fiction judges had highlighted five works with contemporary settings, touching upon everything from race and class in Angela Flournoy’s Detroit-based The Turner House to the chronicle of marriage in Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies to the economy in Karen E. Bender’s story collection “Refund.” Flournoy, in an email sent earlier in the week, observed that fiction “grants us access to lives and experiences that are different from our own, but it also shows the ways in which human experience has commonalities.”
“Fiction makes it clear that while the particulars of our lives vary, we’re all dealing with the same sorts of emotions, the same desires to be loved and seen and heard,” she wrote.
Some of the night’s speakers are known for their takes on current events, but their tone was more personal and the jokes mostly about publishing.
Host Andy Borowitz, who routinely turns out political satires for The New Yorker, had nothing to say about the presidential campaigns but instead mocked the presumed obscurity of the awards’ sponsor, the National Book Foundation, and the presumed self-absorption of the literary community.
“If you’re not in the mood to hear people talking about themselves, you’re in the wrong place,” he said.
DeLillo’s speech came just days after the attacks in Paris, the kind of horror he had imagined in “Mao II” and so much of his work. But the 78-year-old author was at the awards event to talk about books and old friends, mourning such peers as E.L. Doctorow and James Salter, ruminating about the shelves down the hall from where he writes and listing not just the books but their publishers and list prices. (50 cents for Dostoevsky’s “House of the Dead,” a paperback from 1959.)
“I find myself gazing like a museum-goer,” he said of his shelves.
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