Yamashita and Pearl were among the honorees who spoke of a precarious present, worrying about the wave of efforts to censor books at schools and libraries and about violent attacks against racial minorities.
Groff’s novel is based in part on the medieval author Marie de France, an outcast from the French royal court who takes over a rundown abbey in England and helps build it into an economic and social force.
While such famed slavery novels as Toni Morrison’s Beloved draw on historical records for their plots, Jones acknowledged he had no basis for Isaiah and Samuel beyond his certainly that men like them went undocumented.
The event was hosted by actor-writer-comedian Phoebe Robinson, who praised books as a “passport” to the greater world even as she joked that her own books didn’t bring her to the rarefied place of awards finalists.
The National Book Awards were established in 1950, and have gone through several evolutions, with categories expanded for a time to more than 20 and reduced to as few as four.
Judging panels looked through more than 1,800 submitted books.