Last year, the National Book Awards made an accidental discovery: The way to get everyone talking about the nominees is to pick books that no one has read. In 2004, the awards got more press than they had in years. Though the year had seen new novels from several of the best American writers – including Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Marilynne Robinson – the fiction judges picked as finalists five little-known books, none of which had sold well (and all of them, as it happened, by New York writers).

Agree or disagree with the panel’s choices, they had demonstrated an admirable independence from commercial concerns – too admirable for many publishers, who raised an outcry about the squandered opportunity. The Quills Awards, a marketing scheme in the form of a new literary prize, were launched this year partly in reaction to last year’s esoteric NBAs. Ironically, the National Book Foundation, which governs the prestigious awards, has recently been trying hard to make the awards more popular and populist. The Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, given in the past to eminent literary figures like Eudora Welty and John Updike, was given last year to Judy Blume (and the year before that, to Stephen King).

When this year’s prizes are awarded tonight, there will be no such controversy to spoil the glitzy proceedings. The Distinguished Contribution Medal will be an impeccably establishment affair, presented to the wild-manturned-elder-statesman Norman Mailer by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. A new honor, infelicitously named the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, will be given for the first time, to 86-year-old Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a founding father of the Beat movement who has run San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore and publishing imprint for half a century. The new award will help the NBAs to discriminate between those who deserve a prize for contributions to literature, and those – like Oprah Winfrey, honored in 1999 – who are really being thanked for helping to sell books.

This year’s fiction finalists range widely in fame and accomplishment, but they have one big thing in common. Four of the five nominated books are historical novels, which use real people as jumping-off points for fictional explorations.

The best-known writer on the list is E.L. Doctorow, whose “The March” is a sweeping historical novel in the “Ragtime” mold. Taking Sherman’s March to the Sea as his subject, Mr. Doctorow mixes historical figures like Sherman with invented ones – a slave girl, a pair of Confederate soldiers – in order to address some of the biggest American themes: race, power, self-invention. “The March” is definitely the finalist with the best claim to be a Great American Novel, and has to be considered the odds-on favorite to win the fiction prize.

“Europe Central,” the latest huge book by the prolific William Vollmann, similarly experiments with history. Mr. Vollmann, who has been drawn to massive subjects like the settlement of North America and the history of human violence, here takes on the plight of Germany and Russia during World War II. Real figures, especially Dmitri Shostakovich, populate Mr. Vollmann’s interconnected stories of war and oppression.

Violence on a more private and domestic scale has always been Mary Gaitskill’s subject. In “Veronica,” she returns to her favorite themes – sex and sadism, the allure and emptiness of beauty, the New York downtown scene of the 1980s – to tell the story of a ruined former model, and her friendship with an older woman who died of AIDS. Rene Steinke’s “Holy Skirts,” meanwhile, takes on the downtown depravity of an earlier era. In her second novel, Ms. Steinke fictionalizes the life of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, one of the eccentrics who added grotesquerie and glamour to Greenwich Village in the Jazz Age.

Finally, Christopher Sorrentino’s “Trance” brings to life another lost soul, the abductee-turned-terrorist Patty Hearst. In this DeLillo-esque take on the famous story – which also recently inspired the Pulitzer Prize finalist “American Woman,” by Susan Choi – Mr. Sorrentino uses the Hearst case to explore the madness and alienation of media age America.

No matter which book takes home the prize tonight, the NBA fiction judges have done a good job holding the precarious balance between the mainstream and the esoteric. As this year’s other literary awards have shown, tipping too far in either direction can alienate the very readers whom the NBA means to attract.

The corporate-populist Quills Awards, handed out last month for the first time, went practically unnoticed. This was a nice irony, since the Quills’s resolutely middlebrow choices and televised ceremony, populated with B-list stars like Matthew Modine and Kim Cattrall, had no purpose other than to attract the largest possible audience.

But since the Quills’s rules ensured that only best sellers could become finalists, their only effect was to stamp a publishers’ seal of approval on books that were already mass-market successes. As long as its top awards go to the likes of J.K. Rowling (Book of the Year), Elizabeth Kostova, (Debut Author of the Year), and Sue Monk Kidd (General Fiction), the Quills can be nothing more than the prize-giving equivalent of putting “national best seller” on a book’s cover.

The controversy over this year’s Booker Prize winner, by contrast, shows that giving an award to a resolutely serious, sophisticated book can provoke surprisingly hostile reactions. John Banville’s novel “The Sea” was not, perhaps, the best book among the six Booker finalists – Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go,” reportedly the second-place finisher, was considerably more surprising and moving, and Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” was more lively and ambitious.

But Mr. Banville, one of today’s leading Irish writers and an erudite stylist in the Nabokovian tradition, is certainly deserving of honor. This made the vehemence of some critics’ reactions perplexing: Faced with mediocre recent winners like “Life of Pi” and “Vernon God Little,” how could Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of London’s Independent newspaper, call Mr. Banville “possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest”? The answer is simply that complex prose and the favoring of character over plot can still, in some quarters, be derided as “elitist” – as though the very idea of awarding a prize for the year’s best novel is not premised on making value judgments.

No matter which finalist takes home the NBA tonight, it is hard to see him or her coming under such attack. If anything, the list betrays a fondness for Big Themes — History, Identity, Violence – which is very American and finally laudable, though it may leave too little room to appreciate writers (like Mr. Banville) more interested in beauty than ideas.

If all five of the finalists enjoy a boost in sales after tonight, it will be a good thing for American fiction. Unfortunately, however, even the National Book Award may no longer have the taste-making power it once enjoyed. A visit this weekend to the Strand Bookstore showed that at least one of the fiction finalists has already been remaindered.

Other National Book Award Nominees

The National Book Awards’ nonfiction category always presents a problem: It is impossibly broad, covering history, biography, memoir, travel, and just about everything else. Books of such different kinds can’t really be judged against one another, and there are so many candidates that it is fruitless to complain about the omission of any particular book – say, the epochal biography “Mao” by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, or the lovely memoir “Them” by Francine du Plessix Gray.

The most publicized title among the five finalists is “The Year of Magical Thinking,” by Joan Didion, which has been read and discussed just about everywhere this season. Ms. Didion’s memoir of the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and her subsequent mourning, is the most moving book this cool writer has ever produced.

Two other finalists are works of reporting on current events.”102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight To Survive Inside the Twin Towers,” by New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, tells the unbearably sad stories of some of the people killed on September 11, 2001, and investigates the structural and planning flaws that made the attacks so lethal. “Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion,” by science journalist Alan Burdick, tells of a more abstract and slow-motion disaster: the environmental damage that occurs when species spread outside their traditional habitat, eroding the planet’s biological diversity.

The two remaining nonfiction finalists turn back to the 18th century. In “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight To Free an Empire’s Slaves,” Adam Hochschild makes heroes out of the campaigners – politicians and pamphleteers, religious and secular – who fought to end the British slave trade, and in the process invented the tools of modern political activism. And Leo Damrosch’s new biography, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius,” strips the self-created legend from the first modern autobiographer, showing how Rousseau’s very imperfect life helped give birth to his revolutionary philosophy.

In the poetry category, lifetime collections by two poets – W.S. Merwin’s “Migration: New and Selected Poems” and Brendan Galvin’s “Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965-2005”- will compete with new books from John Ashbery (“Where Shall I Wander”), Frank Bidart (“Star Dust”) and Vern Rutsala (“The Moment’s Equation”). Finally, five titles are up for the prize in Young People’s Literature: “The Penderwicks” by Jeanne Birdsall, “Where I Want To Be” by Adele Griffin, “Inexcusable” by Chris Lynch, “Autobiography of My Dead Brother” by Walter Dean Myers, and “Each Little Bird That Sings” by Deborah Wiles.