E Annie Proulx

Gore Vidal didn't show up to accept his National Book Award, but that didn't dull the enthusiasm of the more than 500 people who gathered for one of the premier events in American literature. They applauded wildly Wednesday evening when E. Annie Proulx of Vershire, Vt., won the fiction award for her second novel, "The Shipping News." They clapped hard, too, when A.R. Ammons, who had won before, took the honors in poetry for a collection titled "Garbage."

E. Annie Proulx is talking about her next novel. The one she has scoured seven states to research. The one she wants to lose herself in. But the one she can't write because praise for her most recent novel, "The Shipping News," has kept her on the road. And not finishing this book is like having a bird locked in her head. She can't open her forehead and let it out, and it's in there beating and beating. But Proulx must quell the bird--at least for this month.

E. Annie Proulx was already 57 when her first novel, "Postcards," was published in 1992. Before that, she had churned out free-lance articles about cider, lions, canoeing and mice; she had written short stories for Esquire; she had founded a monthly newspaper called Behind the Times; she had raised three sons and divorced three husbands. "Postcards" was an unexpected sensation. Critics called it "beautiful," "mesmerizing" and "astonishingly accomplished."

It's no particular news by now that democracy, a free market economy and social Darwinism are all names that seem to cover the same set of circumstances. It's no particular news that while "freedom" in a national context means freedom to marry and divorce Ivana Trump, it also covers the freedom to stand for hours in the snow for a chance at an entry-level job.

E. Annie Proulx's sentences evoke the spare granite landscapes of rural New England, where her stories take place. The title story is a devastating portrait of an aspiring country musician who has neither talent nor ambition, just dreams of easy money and celebrity. In the melancholy "Stone City," a newcomer to a tiny Vermont town befriends a forlorn widower and uncovers the mystery of his unbearable memories.