Lowell, Womack Are Considered For Two National Book Awards

Two Harvard faculty members have been nominated for the National Book Award.

Robert Lowell, Emerson Lecturer on English Literature, was nominated for his poetry collection, Notebook 1967-68. John Womack Jr., assistant professor of History, was nominated for his book, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution.

The National Book Award, which provides a $1000 grant, is given for "distinguished books written by Americans published during the preceding year." Seven awards are given each year, and five books are nominated for each award.

The prize winners will be announced at a meeting in New York, March 2. Over 1500 authors, reviewers, editors, and publishers are expected to attend the ceremony, which will be the 21st since the awards were created in 1950.

Controversy over this year's awards concerns two books which were not mentioned, Neither Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint nor Vladimir Nabokov's Ada were nominated, although both books received great critical attention.

Lowell wrote his collection of poems on topics including the Charles River, Che Guevara, Robert Kennedy's death, and the Chicago Convention. The book is entered in the poetry category with Lawrence Ferlinghetti's The Secret Meaning of Things and Elizabeth Bishop's Completed Poems. One of the poetry judges will be Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy (D-Minn.).

Womack's book is about Emiliano Zapata, a guerrilla leader and agrarian reformer of the 1910-1920 period in Mexico. Other contenders in the History and Biography category are Dean Acheson's Present at the Creation and Townsend Hoopes's The Limits of Intervention.

Among those books nominated in the Arts and Letters category were Gore Vidal's Reflections on a Sinking Ship, Richard Howard's Alone with America, and Lillian Hellman's An Unfinished Woman.