Winner of 2024 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award

Press release

The Mark Twain House & Museum Announces Alice McDermott’s Absolution as 2024 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award Winner

Alice McDermott to Join Prize Benefactor David Baldacci to Accept Award on November 1 at The Mark Twain House & Museum

Hartford, CT...The Mark Twain House & Museum is thrilled to award the 2024 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award (MTAVL) to Alice McDermott for her novel, Absolution. McDermott is the author of nine previous novels, including That Night (1987), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Charming Billy (1998), winner of both the American Book Award and the National Book Award. McDermott will receive the award and its accompanying $25,000 prize in person at a The Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award Celebration held on November 1, 2024 at The Mark Twain House & Museum (351 Farmington Avenue, Hartford, CT).

The Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award was established in 2016 and is generously sponsored by Michelle and David Baldacci and Bank of America. Honoring distinguished fiction that speaks with an American voice and tells a uniquely American story, the award seeks to preserve the searching and challenging spirit of Mark Twain’s way of looking at the world. It is given to a work of fiction published in the previous calendar year.

Joe Gianni, president of Bank of America Greater Hartford, states, "Once again, the judges selected a novel that reflects Twain's contribution to literature: a truly American voice telling a singularly American story. Bank of America is delighted to play a part in honoring Alice McDermott for her powerful novel, Absolution."

About the MTAVL Celebration

The MTAVL Celebration, an elegant evening featuring McDermott and Baldacci in conversation and hosted by 3-time Emmy Award-winning journalist Kara Sundlun of WFSB Channel 3, will take place on Friday, November 1 at 6:30pm, at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, CT, and is open to the public. The celebration includes heavy hors d'oeuvres and buffet stations catered by David Alan, the presentation ceremony, a reading from Absolution, a conversation between McDermott and critic and short story writer Rand Richards Cooper, and a dessert reception. There will be a VIP champagne reception with McDermott and Baldacci and for Patron-level ticket holders and sponsors at 5:30pm. Tickets are $200. The Patron ticket, which includes the VIP reception and a signed copy of Absolution, is $300. Tickets and more information are available at marktwainhouse.org/mtavlcelebration/.

The MTAVL Celebration is supported by Presenting Sponsor Bank of America. Additional support is provided by Premier Sponsor Webster Bank, Chapter Sponsor Ares Management, Page Sponsors The Hartford and Liberty Bank, and Text Sponsor Barnes Group. To inquire about being an MTAVL Celebration sponsor or group sales, please email Dawn Veillette Diana, MTH&M director of development, at dawn.vdiana@marktwainhouse.org.

About Absolution

Chosen from over 150 books submitted by a wide range of publishers, Absolution (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux) tells the story of Patricia Kelly, the young and decorous wife of a Navy intelligence officer posted to Saigon in 1963, during the early years of the Vietnam War. The novel highlights Tricia’s friendship with another military wife, Charlene, and their effort to undertake charitable actions on behalf of the Vietnamese. Told retrospectively, through an exchange of letters more than half a century later between an elderly Patricia and Charlene’s now middle-aged daughter, Absolution explores issues that include the tragic futility of our presence in Vietnam, the complexities of class in the U.S., and the role of women in marriage and career.

The judges on the MTAVL panel praised Absolution for its vivid depiction of a long-ago era, and for its sympathetic portrayal of a naively idealistic young woman trying to make her way in a place where naïve idealism would prove unsustainable. A deeply American story, Absolution is told as an intergenerational epistolary novel, a form that allows McDermott to frame her themes with a view of the historical dynamic that shaped them – even as she offers readers the long view of our most cherished human relationships. “In its private exchanges,” a judge noted, “Absolution quietly celebrates the ability of narrative writing to inspire memory and to re-establish connections across time.”

“Absolution is a transcendently good novel,” another judge commented. “McDermott masterfully evokes time and place, with the kind of detail that seems impossible to invent, and fully grasps the psychology of her working-class, Irish Catholic characters. And she is incapable of writing an untrue sentence.” A third judge agreed, commenting that “what I most admired about this novel is the gorgeous writing. Some sentences should win prizes.”

The 2024 MATVL Finalist Panel of Judges includes novelist Ann Hood, novelist and legal scholar Lawrence Douglas, 2023 MTAVL recipient Jennifer Haigh, Twain scholar Lawrence Howe, and Rand Richards Cooper.

Previous winners of The Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award include Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh (2023), The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton (2022); The Only Good Indian by Stephen Graham Jones (2021); On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (2020); Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2019); Dodgers by Bill Beverly (2018); and The Harder They Come by T.C. Boyle (2017).