John Burt

2024 Prize Americana Winner

A Moment’s Surrender follows freshman writing instructor Paul Bishop in the aftermath of the murder of his former best friend, the renowned poet Tom Corbin. Haunted by guilt and bound by a devastating secret, Paul takes it upon himself to care for Tom’s terminally ill widow, Susan. But the truth he withholds — that Tom had planned to leave Susan for another woman, Paul’s own long-ago lover Rachel Lake — draws Paul into a painful triangle of loyalty, betrayal, and unresolved desire. Caught between the two women, Paul must navigate a web of grief and deception that threatens to undo them all.

Leverett Butts’ Heroes with a Hundred Names: Mythology and Folklore in the Early Fiction of Robert Penn Warren is a daring and insightful reading of Penn Warren’s use of mythological and folkloric materials in the four novels of his major phase, beginning with Night Rider in 1939 (Houghton Mifflin), and closing with Band of Angels in 1955 (Random House). The book reflects Butts’ deep immersion in Warren’s fiction; his grasp of Warren’s key themes and of Warren’s critique of the materialism and rootlessness of contemporary society; his sensitive understanding of the characters’ psychologies and moral predicaments; and the investment he shares with Warren in comparative mythology.

Percival Everett’s James (2024) is a creative response to Huckleberry Finn (1885). It is not

a parody or a “talking back” to another book, as Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001)

is to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) (or as Larry Brenner’s brief 1990 “A

Letter to ‘De Ole True Huck’” is to Huckleberry Finn). Everett transforms the novel, paying

attention to the features of it that have drawn the most criticism over the last generation,

but at the same time his novel seeks to preserve what he takes to be Twain’s deepest values,

seeking to repair the book’s failings while remaining true to its meaning as he understands

it.