Didion's memoir about the death of her husband, author John Gregory Dunne, brought the 70-year-old writer her first National Book Award in her 40-year career and continued a wave of virtually nonstop praise since the book came out a month ago.

''There's hardly anything I can say about this except thank you,'' Didion said Wednesday night, praising her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, for supporting her as she wrote her painfully personal best seller.

Didion has long been idolized by writers for her precise, incisive fiction and literary journalism. But The Year of Magical Thinking brought her a large readership, too, with booksellers saying that her memoir has been especially in demand from those who lost a loved one or knew someone who had.

Few were surprised by Didion's victory. Few were not surprised by the announcement for fiction: William Vollmann, cited for Europe Central, an 800-page novel, complete with footnotes, about Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II.

E.L. Doctorow's The March and Mary Gaitskill's Veronica had been regarded as the leading contenders.

''I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech,'' said Vollmann, 46, who then turned serious as he said his book was inspired by a film he saw in elementary school ''about burned corpses being pulled out of ovens.''

Vollmann noted he was part German and wondered what he would have done had he lived under the Nazis.

A couple of hours before Vollman's victory, the 82-year-old Mailer - slowed by heart surgery and bad knees - was helped to the stage and in a strong voice declared that technology was outwitting the literary novelist and that serious writers were like carriage makers ''before the onrush of the automobile.''

It was a night for first-time winners, though some waited far longer than others. W.S. Merwin, 78 years old and a published poet since the 1950s, finally won in poetry for Migration. The winner of the young people's literature award, Jeanne Birdsall, pulled it off with her debut book. Her novel, The Penderwicks, tells of four sisters and their widowed father.