Tracy Campbell has won the New-York Historical Society's annual Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History for The Year of Peril: America in 1942 (Yale University Press). The award recognizes the best book of the year in the field of American history or biography, and Campbell receives $50,000, a medal and the title of American Historian Laureate.
Pam Schafler, chair of New-York Historical Society's board of trustees, said, "Tracy Campbell has written a remarkable book, offering a refreshingly new perspective on America's entry into the Second World War, focused on the battles being waged on the home front, rather than in the Pacific. In the eyes of our judging committee, The Year of Peril is meticulously researched and eminently readable, bringing to the fore the myriad crises FDR faced as he tried to forge some sense of common purpose among the citizens of a nation still grappling with the aftermath of the Great Depression and the cries of isolationists who objected to America's involvement in other countries' conflicts."
Tracy Campbell is the E. Vernon Smith and Eloise C. Smith Professor of American History at the University of Kentucky. His previous books include The Gateway Arch: A Biography and Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition, 1742-2004.
---
Nicole Krauss has won the inaugural Sami Rohr Inspiration Award for Fiction and will be presented with the $36,000 award at a virtual ceremony in June. The Inspiration Award, introduced this year to mark the 15th anniversary of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, recognizes "a well-known author whose books have made a valuable contribution to Jewish literature and who will serve as a role model to Fellows of the Sami Rohr Jewish Literary Institute. "
Krauss is the author of Man Walks Into a Room, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year in 2003; Forest Dark; Great House, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize; The History of Love, winner of the Saroyan Prize for International Literature and France's Prix du Meilleur Livre EĢtranger; and To Be a Man, her first collection of short stories, which was published in November 2020.
In 2007, she was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, and in 2010 she was chosen by the New Yorker for its "Twenty Under Forty" list. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories. She is the first Writer-in-Residence at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University.