Jason Epstein, the editorial director at Random House, was named the winner Thursday of the National Book Awards Medal, a new honor ``for distinguished contribution to American letters.'' Epstein has been an editor at Random House for 30 years, working with such authors as W.H Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and E.L. Doctorow. The award was conceived to honor ``someone long connected with books who has had an extraordinary and permanent impact on American letters,'' said Roger Stevens, chairman of the board of the National Book Awards Inc. Epstein, 60, founded Anchor Books, the first American quality paperback line, when he was a 24-year-old editor at Doubleday. During a 1963 newspaper strike, he founded the New York Review of Books, which now has a circulation of 150,000. In 1982, he started The Library of America _ a series of uniform editions of books by America's greatest writers. Epstein was chosen by the board of directors of the National Book Awards Inc. The award, which carries a $10,000 cash prize, will be presented at the Nov. 29 National Book Awards dinner, when winners of the fiction and non-fiction awards will be announced.
