Harvard Professor Greenblatt Wins $10,000 National Book Award

Nov. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Stephen Greenblatt won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in New York last night for "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" (Norton), the history of an ancient Roman book, Lucretius's "On the Nature of Things," and how its rediscovery fueled the Renaissance.

"I find myself fighting back tears," said Greenblatt, a humanities professor at Harvard. "My book is about the power of books to cross boundaries, to speak to you impossibly across space, time and distance. To have someone long dead seem to be in the room with you and speaking into your ear."...