Stephen King's Speech at the National Book Awards

Stephen King
Winner of the 2003
DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN LETTERS AWARD


Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you for the applause and thank you
for coming. I'm delighted to be here but, as I've said before in the last
five years, I'm delighted to be anywhere.

This isn't in my speech so don't take it out of my allotted time. There are
some people who have spoken out passionately about giving me this medal.
There are some people who think it's an extraordinarily bad idea. There have
been some people who have spoken out who think it's an extraordinarily good
idea. You know who you are and where you stand and most of you who are here
tonight are on my side. I'm glad for that. But I want to say it doesn't
matter in a sense which side you were on. The people who speak out, speak
out because they are passionate about the book, about the word, about the
page and, in that sense, we're all brothers and sisters. Give yourself a
hand.

Now as for my remarks. The only person who understands how much this award
means to me is my wife, Tabitha. I was a writer when I met her in 1967 but
my only venue was the campus newspaper where I published a rude weekly
column. It turned me into a bit of a celebrity but I was a poor one,
scraping through college thanks to a jury-rigged package of loans and
scholarships.

A friend of Tabitha Spruce pointed me out to her one winter day as I crossed
the mall in my jeans and cut-down green rubber boots. I had a bushy black
beard. I hadn't had my hair cut in two years and I looked like Charlie
Manson. My wife-to-be clasped her hands between her breasts and said, "I
think I'm in love" in a tone dripping with sarcasm.

Tabby Spruce had no more money than I did but with sarcasm she was loaded.
When we married in 1971, we already had one child. By the middle of 1972, we
had a pair. I taught school and worked in a laundry during the summer. Tabby
worked for Dunkin' Donuts. When she was working, I took care of the kids.
When I was working, it was vice versa. And writing was always an undisputed
part of that work. Tabby finished the first book of our marriage, a slim but
wonderful book of poetry called Grimoire.

This is a very atypical audience, one passionately dedicated to books and to
the word. Most of the world, however, sees writing as a fairly useless
occupation. I've even heard it called mental masturbation, once or twice by
people in my family. I never heard that from my wife. She'd read my stuff
and felt certain I'd some day support us by writing full time, instead of
standing in front of a blackboard and spouting on about Jack London and
Ogden Nash. She never made a big deal of this. It was just a fact of our
lives. We lived in a trailer and she made a writing space for me in the tiny
laundry room with a desk and her Olivetti portable between the washer and
dryer. She still tells people I married her for that typewriter but that's
only partly true. I married her because I loved her and because we got on as
well out of bed as in it. The typewriter was a factor, though.

When I gave up on Carrie, it was Tabby who rescued the first few pages of
single spaced manuscript from the wastebasket, told me it was good, said I
ought to go on. When I told her I didn't know how to go on, she helped me
out with the girls' locker room stuff. There were no inspiring speeches.
Tabby does sarcasm, Tabby doesn't do inspiration, never has. It was just
"this is pretty good, you ought to keep it going." That was all I needed and
she knew it.

There were some hard, dark years before Carrie. We had two kids and no
money. We rotated the bills, paying on different ones each month. I kept our
car, an old Buick, going with duct tape and bailing wire. It was a time when
my wife might have been expected to say, "Why don't you quit spending three
hours a night in the laundry room, Steve, smoking cigarettes and drinking
beer we can't afford? Why don't you get an actual job?"

Okay, this is the real stuff. If she'd asked, I almost certainly would have
done it. And then am I standing up here tonight, making a speech, accepting
the award, wearing a radar dish around my neck? Maybe. More likely not. In
fact, the subject of moonlighting did come up once. The head of the English
department where I taught told me that the debate club was going to need a
new faculty advisor and he put me up for the job if I wanted. It would pay
$300 per school year which doesn't sound like much but my yearly take in
1973 was only $6,600 and $300 equaled ten weeks worth of groceries.

The English department head told me he'd need my decision by the end of the
week. When I told Tabby about the opening, she asked if I'd still have time
to write. I told her not as much. Her response to that was unequivocal,
"Well then, you can't take it."

One of the few times during the early years of our marriage I saw my wife
cry really hard was when I told her that a paperback publisher, New American
Library, had paid a ton of money for the book she'd rescued from the trash.
I could quit teaching, she could quit pushing crullers at Dunkin' Donuts.
She looked almost unbelieving for five seconds and then she put her hands
over her face and she wept. When she finally stopped, we went into the
living room and sat on our old couch, which Tabby had rescued from a yard
sale, and talked into the early hours of the morning about what we were
going to do with the money. I've never had a more pleasant conversation. I
have never had one that felt more surreal.

My point is that Tabby always knew what I was supposed to be doing and she
believed that I would succeed at it. There is a time in the lives of most
writers when they are vulnerable, when the vivid dreams and ambitions of
childhood seem to pale in the harsh sunlight of what we call the real world.
In short, there's a time when things can go either way.
That vulnerable time for me came during 1971 to 1973. If my wife had
suggested to me even with love and kindness and gentleness rather than her
more common wit and good natured sarcasm that the time had come to put my
dreams away and support my family, I would have done that with no complaint.
I believe that on some level of thought I was expecting to have that
conversation. If she had suggested that you can't buy a loaf of bread or a
tube of toothpaste with rejection slips, I would have gone out and found a
part time job.

Tabby has told me since that it never crossed her mind to have such a
conversation. You had a second job, she said, in the laundry room with my
typewriter. I hope you know, Tabby, that they are clapping for you and not
for me. Stand up so they can see you, please. Thank you. Thank you. I did
not let her see this speech, and I will hear about this later.

Now, there are lots of people who will tell you that anyone who writes genre
fiction or any kind of fiction that tells a story is in it for the money and
nothing else. It's a lie. The idea that all storytellers are in it for the
money is untrue but it is still hurtful, it's infuriating and it's
demeaning. I never in my life wrote a single word for money. As badly as we
needed money, I never wrote for money. From those early days to this gala
black tie night, I never once sat down at my desk thinking today I'm going
to make a hundred grand. Or this story will make a great movie. If I had
tried to write with those things in mind, I believe I would have sold my
birthright for a plot of message, as the old pun has it. Either way, Tabby
and I would still be living in a trailer or an equivalent, a boat. My wife
knows the importance of this award isn't the recognition of being a great
writer or even a good writer but the recognition of being an honest writer.

Frank Norris, the author of McTeague, said something like this: "What should
I care if they, i.e., the critics, single me out for sneers and laughter? I
never truckled, I never lied. I told the truth." And that's always been the
bottom line for me. The story and the people in it may be make believe but I
need to ask myself over and over if I've told the truth about the way real
people would behave in a similar situation.

Of course, I only have my own senses, experiences and reading to draw on but
that usually - not always but usually - usually it's enough. It gets the job
done. For instance, if an elevator full of people, one of the ones in this
very building - I want you to think about this later, I want you to think
about it - if it starts to vibrate and you hear those clanks - this probably
won't happen but we all know it has happened, it could happen. It could
happen to me or it could happen to you. Someone always wins the lottery.
Just put it away for now until you go up to your rooms later. Anyway, if an
elevator full of people starts free-falling from the 35th floor of the
skyscraper all the way to the bottom, one of those view elevators, perhaps,
where you can watch it happening, in my opinion, no one is going to say,
"Goodbye, Neil, I will see you in heaven." In my book or my short story,
they're far more apt to bellow, "Oh shit" at the top of their lungs because
what I've read and heard tends to confirm the "Oh shit" choice. If that
makes me a cynic, so be it.

I remember a story on the nightly news about an airliner that crashed
killing all aboard. The so-called black box was recovered and we have the
pilot's immortal last four words: "Son of a bitch". Of course, there was
another plane that crashed and the black box recorder said, "Goodbye,
Mother," which is a nicer way to go out, I think.

Folks are far more apt to go out with a surprised ejaculation, however, then
an expiring abjuration like, "Marry her, Jake. Bible says it ain't good for
a man to be alone." If I happen to be the writer of such a death bed scene,
I'd choose "Son of a bitch" over "Marry her, Jake" every time. We understand
that fiction is a lie to begin with. To ignore the truth inside the lie is
to sin against the craft, in general, and one's own work in particular.

I'm sure I've made the wrong choices from time to time. Doesn't the Bible
say something like, "for all have sinned and come short of the glory of
Chaucer?" But every time I did it, I was sorry. Sorry is cheap, though. I
have revised the lie out if I could and that's far more important. When
readers are deeply entranced by a story, they forget the storyteller
completely. The tale is all they care about.

But the storyteller cannot afford to forget and must always be ready to hold
himself or herself to account. He or she needs to remember that the truth
lends verisimilitude to the lies that surround it. If you tell your reader,
"Sometimes chickens will pick out the weakest one in the flock and peck it
to death," the truth, the reader is much more likely to go along with you
than if you then add something like, "Such chickens often meld into the
earth after their deaths."

How stringently the writer holds to the truth inside the lie is one of the
ways that he can judge how seriously he takes his craft. My wife, who
doesn't seem to know how to a lie even in a social context where people
routinely say things like, "You look wonderful, have you lost weight?" has
always understood these things without needing to have them spelled out.
She's what the Bible calls a pearl beyond price. She also understands why I
was in those early days so often bitterly angry at writers who were
considered "literary." I knew I didn't have quite enough talent or polish to
be one of them so there was an element of jealousy, but I was also
infuriated by how these writers always seemed to have the inside track in my
view at that time.

Even a note in the acknowledgments page of a novel thanking the this or that
foundation for its generous assistance was enough to set me off. I knew what
it meant, I told my wife. It was the Old Boy Network at work. It was this,
it was that, on and on and blah, blah, blah. It is only in retrospect that I
realize how much I sounded like my least favorite uncle who believed there
really was an international Jewish cabal running everything from the Ford
Motor Company to the Federal Reserve.

Tabitha listened to a fair amount of this pissing and moaning and finally
told me to stop with the breast beating. She said to save my self-pity and
turn my energy to the typewriter. She paused and then added, my typewriter.
I did because she was right and my anger played much better when channeled
into about a dozen stories which I wrote in 1973 and early 1974. Not all of
them were good but most of them were honest and I realized an amazing thing:
Readers of the men's magazines where I was published were remembering my
name and starting to look for it. I could hardly believe it but it appeared
that people wanted to read what I was writing. There's never been a thrill
in my life to equal that one. With Tabby's help, I was able to put aside my
useless jealousy and get writing again. I sold more of my short stories. I
sold Carrie and the rest, as they say, is history.

There's been a certain amount of grumbling about the decision to give the
award to me and since so much of this speech has been about my wife, I
wanted to give you her opinion on the subject. She's read everything I've
written, making her something of an expert, and her view of my work is
loving but unsentimental. Tabby says I deserve the medal not just because
some good movies were made from my stories or because I've provided high
motivational reading material for slow learners, she says I deserve the
medal because I am a, quote, "Damn good writer".

I've tried to improve myself with every book and find the truth inside the
lie. Sometimes I have succeeded. I salute the National Book Foundation
Board, who took a huge risk in giving this award to a man many people see as
a rich hack. For far too long the so-called popular writers of this country
and the so-called literary writers have stared at each other with animosity
and a willful lack of understanding. This is the way it has always been.
Witness my childish resentment of anyone who ever got a Guggenheim.

But giving an award like this to a guy like me suggests that in the future
things don't have to be the way they've always been. Bridges can be built
between the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction.
The first gainers in such a widening of interest would be the readers, of
course, which is us because writers are almost always readers and listeners
first. You have been very good and patient listeners and I'm going to let
you go soon but I'd like to say one more thing before I do.

Tokenism is not allowed. You can't sit back, give a self satisfied sigh and
say, "Ah, that takes care of the troublesome pop lit question. In another
twenty years or perhaps thirty, we'll give this award to another writer who
sells enough books to make the best seller lists." It's not good enough. Nor
do I have any patience with or use for those who make a point of pride in
saying they've never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins
Clark or any other popular writer.

What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for
deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture? Never in life, as
Capt. Lucky Jack Aubrey would say. And if your only point of reference for
Jack Aubrey is the Australian actor, Russell Crowe, shame on you.
There's a writer here tonight, my old friend and some time collaborator,
Peter Straub. He's just published what may be the best book of his career.
Lost Boy Lost Girl surely deserves your consideration for the NBA short list
next year, if not the award itself. Have you read it? Have any of the judges
read it?

There's another writer here tonight who writes under the name of Jack
Ketchum and he has also written what may be the best book of his career, a
long novella called The Crossings. Have you read it? Have any of the judges
read it? And yet Jack Ketchum's first novel, Off Season published in 1980,
set off a furor in my supposed field, that of horror, that was unequaled
until the advent of Clive Barker. It is not too much to say that these two
gentlemen remade the face of American popular fiction and yet very few
people here will have an idea of who I'm talking about or have read the
work.

This is not criticism, it's just me pointing out a blind spot in the
winnowing process and in the very act of reading the fiction of one's own
culture. Honoring me is a step in a different direction, a fruitful one, I
think. I'm asking you, almost begging you, not to go back to the old way of
doing things. There's a great deal of good stuff out there and not all of it
is being done by writers whose work is regularly reviewed in the Sunday New
York Times Book Review. I believe the time comes when you must be inclusive
rather than exclusive.
That said, I accept this award on behalf of such disparate writers as Elmore
Leonard, Peter Straub, Nora Lofts, Jack Ketchum, whose real name is Dallas
Mayr, Jodi Picoult, Greg Iles, John Grisham, Dennis Lehane, Michael
Connolly, Pete Hamill and a dozen more. I hope that the National Book Award
judges, past, present and future, will read these writers and that the books
will open their eyes to a whole new realm of American literature. You don't
have to vote for them, just read them.

Okay, thanks for bearing with me. This is the last page? This is it. Parting
is such sweet sorrow. My message is simple enough. We can build bridges
between the popular and the literary if we keep our minds and hearts open.
With my wife's help, I have tried to do that. Now I'm going to turn the
actual medal over to her because she will make sure in all the excitement
that it doesn't get lost.

In closing, I want to say that I hope you all find something good to read
tonight or tomorrow. I want to salute all the nominees in the four
categories that are up for consideration and I do, I hope you'll find
something to read that will fill you up as this evening as filled me up.
Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you for the applause and thank you
for coming. I'm delighted to be here but, as I've said before in the last
five years, I'm delighted to be anywhere.

This isn't in my speech so don't take it out of my allotted time. There are
some people who have spoken out passionately about giving me this medal.
There are some people who think it's an extraordinarily bad idea. There have
been some people who have spoken out who think it's an extraordinarily good
idea. You know who you are and where you stand and most of you who are here
tonight are on my side. I'm glad for that. But I want to say it doesn't
matter in a sense which side you were on. The people who speak out, speak
out because they are passionate about the book, about the word, about the
page and, in that sense, we're all brothers and sisters. Give yourself a
hand.

Now as for my remarks. The only person who understands how much this award
means to me is my wife, Tabitha. I was a writer when I met her in 1967 but
my only venue was the campus newspaper where I published a rude weekly
column. It turned me into a bit of a celebrity but I was a poor one,
scraping through college thanks to a jury-rigged package of loans and
scholarships.

A friend of Tabitha Spruce pointed me out to her one winter day as I crossed
the mall in my jeans and cut-down green rubber boots. I had a bushy black
beard. I hadn't had my hair cut in two years and I looked like Charlie
Manson. My wife-to-be clasped her hands between her breasts and said, "I
think I'm in love" in a tone dripping with sarcasm.

Tabby Spruce had no more money than I did but with sarcasm she was loaded.
When we married in 1971, we already had one child. By the middle of 1972, we
had a pair. I taught school and worked in a laundry during the summer. Tabby
worked for Dunkin' Donuts. When she was working, I took care of the kids.
When I was working, it was vice versa. And writing was always an undisputed
part of that work. Tabby finished the first book of our marriage, a slim but
wonderful book of poetry called Grimoire.

This is a very atypical audience, one passionately dedicated to books and to
the word. Most of the world, however, sees writing as a fairly useless
occupation. I've even heard it called mental masturbation, once or twice by
people in my family. I never heard that from my wife. She'd read my stuff
and felt certain I'd some day support us by writing full time, instead of
standing in front of a blackboard and spouting on about Jack London and
Ogden Nash. She never made a big deal of this. It was just a fact of our
lives. We lived in a trailer and she made a writing space for me in the tiny
laundry room with a desk and her Olivetti portable between the washer and
dryer. She still tells people I married her for that typewriter but that's
only partly true. I married her because I loved her and because we got on as
well out of bed as in it. The typewriter was a factor, though.

When I gave up on Carrie, it was Tabby who rescued the first few pages of
single spaced manuscript from the wastebasket, told me it was good, said I
ought to go on. When I told her I didn't know how to go on, she helped me
out with the girls' locker room stuff. There were no inspiring speeches.
Tabby does sarcasm, Tabby doesn't do inspiration, never has. It was just
"this is pretty good, you ought to keep it going." That was all I needed and
she knew it.

There were some hard, dark years before Carrie. We had two kids and no
money. We rotated the bills, paying on different ones each month. I kept our
car, an old Buick, going with duct tape and bailing wire. It was a time when
my wife might have been expected to say, "Why don't you quit spending three
hours a night in the laundry room, Steve, smoking cigarettes and drinking
beer we can't afford? Why don't you get an actual job?"

Okay, this is the real stuff. If she'd asked, I almost certainly would have
done it. And then am I standing up here tonight, making a speech, accepting
the award, wearing a radar dish around my neck? Maybe. More likely not. In
fact, the subject of moonlighting did come up once. The head of the English
department where I taught told me that the debate club was going to need a
new faculty advisor and he put me up for the job if I wanted. It would pay
$300 per school year which doesn't sound like much but my yearly take in
1973 was only $6,600 and $300 equaled ten weeks worth of groceries.

The English department head told me he'd need my decision by the end of the
week. When I told Tabby about the opening, she asked if I'd still have time
to write. I told her not as much. Her response to that was unequivocal,
"Well then, you can't take it."

One of the few times during the early years of our marriage I saw my wife
cry really hard was when I told her that a paperback publisher, New American
Library, had paid a ton of money for the book she'd rescued from the trash.
I could quit teaching, she could quit pushing crullers at Dunkin' Donuts.
She looked almost unbelieving for five seconds and then she put her hands
over her face and she wept. When she finally stopped, we went into the
living room and sat on our old couch, which Tabby had rescued from a yard
sale, and talked into the early hours of the morning about what we were
going to do with the money. I've never had a more pleasant conversation. I
have never had one that felt more surreal.

My point is that Tabby always knew what I was supposed to be doing and she
believed that I would succeed at it. There is a time in the lives of most
writers when they are vulnerable, when the vivid dreams and ambitions of
childhood seem to pale in the harsh sunlight of what we call the real world.
In short, there's a time when things can go either way.
That vulnerable time for me came during 1971 to 1973. If my wife had
suggested to me even with love and kindness and gentleness rather than her
more common wit and good natured sarcasm that the time had come to put my
dreams away and support my family, I would have done that with no complaint.
I believe that on some level of thought I was expecting to have that
conversation. If she had suggested that you can't buy a loaf of bread or a
tube of toothpaste with rejection slips, I would have gone out and found a
part time job.

Tabby has told me since that it never crossed her mind to have such a
conversation. You had a second job, she said, in the laundry room with my
typewriter. I hope you know, Tabby, that they are clapping for you and not
for me. Stand up so they can see you, please. Thank you. Thank you. I did
not let her see this speech, and I will hear about this later.

Now, there are lots of people who will tell you that anyone who writes genre
fiction or any kind of fiction that tells a story is in it for the money and
nothing else. It's a lie. The idea that all storytellers are in it for the
money is untrue but it is still hurtful, it's infuriating and it's
demeaning. I never in my life wrote a single word for money. As badly as we
needed money, I never wrote for money. From those early days to this gala
black tie night, I never once sat down at my desk thinking today I'm going
to make a hundred grand. Or this story will make a great movie. If I had
tried to write with those things in mind, I believe I would have sold my
birthright for a plot of message, as the old pun has it. Either way, Tabby
and I would still be living in a trailer or an equivalent, a boat. My wife
knows the importance of this award isn't the recognition of being a great
writer or even a good writer but the recognition of being an honest writer.

Frank Norris, the author of McTeague, said something like this: "What should
I care if they, i.e., the critics, single me out for sneers and laughter? I
never truckled, I never lied. I told the truth." And that's always been the
bottom line for me. The story and the people in it may be make believe but I
need to ask myself over and over if I've told the truth about the way real
people would behave in a similar situation.

Of course, I only have my own senses, experiences and reading to draw on but
that usually - not always but usually - usually it's enough. It gets the job
done. For instance, if an elevator full of people, one of the ones in this
very building - I want you to think about this later, I want you to think
about it - if it starts to vibrate and you hear those clanks - this probably
won't happen but we all know it has happened, it could happen. It could
happen to me or it could happen to you. Someone always wins the lottery.
Just put it away for now until you go up to your rooms later. Anyway, if an
elevator full of people starts free-falling from the 35th floor of the
skyscraper all the way to the bottom, one of those view elevators, perhaps,
where you can watch it happening, in my opinion, no one is going to say,
"Goodbye, Neil, I will see you in heaven." In my book or my short story,
they're far more apt to bellow, "Oh shit" at the top of their lungs because
what I've read and heard tends to confirm the "Oh shit" choice. If that
makes me a cynic, so be it.

I remember a story on the nightly news about an airliner that crashed
killing all aboard. The so-called black box was recovered and we have the
pilot's immortal last four words: "Son of a bitch". Of course, there was
another plane that crashed and the black box recorder said, "Goodbye,
Mother," which is a nicer way to go out, I think.

Folks are far more apt to go out with a surprised ejaculation, however, then
an expiring abjuration like, "Marry her, Jake. Bible says it ain't good for
a man to be alone." If I happen to be the writer of such a death bed scene,
I'd choose "Son of a bitch" over "Marry her, Jake" every time. We understand
that fiction is a lie to begin with. To ignore the truth inside the lie is
to sin against the craft, in general, and one's own work in particular.

I'm sure I've made the wrong choices from time to time. Doesn't the Bible
say something like, "for all have sinned and come short of the glory of
Chaucer?" But every time I did it, I was sorry. Sorry is cheap, though. I
have revised the lie out if I could and that's far more important. When
readers are deeply entranced by a story, they forget the storyteller
completely. The tale is all they care about.

But the storyteller cannot afford to forget and must always be ready to hold
himself or herself to account. He or she needs to remember that the truth
lends verisimilitude to the lies that surround it. If you tell your reader,
"Sometimes chickens will pick out the weakest one in the flock and peck it
to death," the truth, the reader is much more likely to go along with you
than if you then add something like, "Such chickens often meld into the
earth after their deaths."

How stringently the writer holds to the truth inside the lie is one of the
ways that he can judge how seriously he takes his craft. My wife, who
doesn't seem to know how to a lie even in a social context where people
routinely say things like, "You look wonderful, have you lost weight?" has
always understood these things without needing to have them spelled out.
She's what the Bible calls a pearl beyond price. She also understands why I
was in those early days so often bitterly angry at writers who were
considered "literary." I knew I didn't have quite enough talent or polish to
be one of them so there was an element of jealousy, but I was also
infuriated by how these writers always seemed to have the inside track in my
view at that time.

Even a note in the acknowledgments page of a novel thanking the this or that
foundation for its generous assistance was enough to set me off. I knew what
it meant, I told my wife. It was the Old Boy Network at work. It was this,
it was that, on and on and blah, blah, blah. It is only in retrospect that I
realize how much I sounded like my least favorite uncle who believed there
really was an international Jewish cabal running everything from the Ford
Motor Company to the Federal Reserve.

Tabitha listened to a fair amount of this pissing and moaning and finally
told me to stop with the breast beating. She said to save my self-pity and
turn my energy to the typewriter. She paused and then added, my typewriter.
I did because she was right and my anger played much better when channeled
into about a dozen stories which I wrote in 1973 and early 1974. Not all of
them were good but most of them were honest and I realized an amazing thing:
Readers of the men's magazines where I was published were remembering my
name and starting to look for it. I could hardly believe it but it appeared
that people wanted to read what I was writing. There's never been a thrill
in my life to equal that one. With Tabby's help, I was able to put aside my
useless jealousy and get writing again. I sold more of my short stories. I
sold Carrie and the rest, as they say, is history.

There's been a certain amount of grumbling about the decision to give the
award to me and since so much of this speech has been about my wife, I
wanted to give you her opinion on the subject. She's read everything I've
written, making her something of an expert, and her view of my work is
loving but unsentimental. Tabby says I deserve the medal not just because
some good movies were made from my stories or because I've provided high
motivational reading material for slow learners, she says I deserve the
medal because I am a, quote, "Damn good writer".

I've tried to improve myself with every book and find the truth inside the
lie. Sometimes I have succeeded. I salute the National Book Foundation
Board, who took a huge risk in giving this award to a man many people see as
a rich hack. For far too long the so-called popular writers of this country
and the so-called literary writers have stared at each other with animosity
and a willful lack of understanding. This is the way it has always been.
Witness my childish resentment of anyone who ever got a Guggenheim.

But giving an award like this to a guy like me suggests that in the future
things don't have to be the way they've always been. Bridges can be built
between the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction.
The first gainers in such a widening of interest would be the readers, of
course, which is us because writers are almost always readers and listeners
first. You have been very good and patient listeners and I'm going to let
you go soon but I'd like to say one more thing before I do.

Tokenism is not allowed. You can't sit back, give a self satisfied sigh and
say, "Ah, that takes care of the troublesome pop lit question. In another
twenty years or perhaps thirty, we'll give this award to another writer who
sells enough books to make the best seller lists." It's not good enough. Nor
do I have any patience with or use for those who make a point of pride in
saying they've never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins
Clark or any other popular writer.

What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for
deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture? Never in life, as
Capt. Lucky Jack Aubrey would say. And if your only point of reference for
Jack Aubrey is the Australian actor, Russell Crowe, shame on you.
There's a writer here tonight, my old friend and some time collaborator,
Peter Straub. He's just published what may be the best book of his career.
Lost Boy Lost Girl surely deserves your consideration for the NBA short list
next year, if not the award itself. Have you read it? Have any of the judges
read it?

There's another writer here tonight who writes under the name of Jack
Ketchum and he has also written what may be the best book of his career, a
long novella called The Crossings. Have you read it? Have any of the judges
read it? And yet Jack Ketchum's first novel, Off Season published in 1980,
set off a furor in my supposed field, that of horror, that was unequaled
until the advent of Clive Barker. It is not too much to say that these two
gentlemen remade the face of American popular fiction and yet very few
people here will have an idea of who I'm talking about or have read the
work.

This is not criticism, it's just me pointing out a blind spot in the
winnowing process and in the very act of reading the fiction of one's own
culture. Honoring me is a step in a different direction, a fruitful one, I
think. I'm asking you, almost begging you, not to go back to the old way of
doing things. There's a great deal of good stuff out there and not all of it
is being done by writers whose work is regularly reviewed in the Sunday New
York Times Book Review. I believe the time comes when you must be inclusive
rather than exclusive.
That said, I accept this award on behalf of such disparate writers as Elmore
Leonard, Peter Straub, Nora Lofts, Jack Ketchum, whose real name is Dallas
Mayr, Jodi Picoult, Greg Iles, John Grisham, Dennis Lehane, Michael
Connolly, Pete Hamill and a dozen more. I hope that the National Book Award
judges, past, present and future, will read these writers and that the books
will open their eyes to a whole new realm of American literature. You don't
have to vote for them, just read them.

Okay, thanks for bearing with me. This is the last page? This is it. Parting
is such sweet sorrow. My message is simple enough. We can build bridges
between the popular and the literary if we keep our minds and hearts open.
With my wife's help, I have tried to do that. Now I'm going to turn the
actual medal over to her because she will make sure in all the excitement
that it doesn't get lost.

In closing, I want to say that I hope you all find something good to read
tonight or tomorrow. I want to salute all the nominees in the four
categories that are up for consideration and I do, I hope you'll find
something to read that will fill you up as this evening as filled me up.
Thank you.

Source: http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_sking.html