NEW YORK -- Like ancient biblical prophets, three majestic writers of the past century pointed fingers of warning at the nation's literary establishment here Wednesday.

America's literary tradition is in peril, said Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the 56th annual National Book Awards ceremony, an event that brings out the leaders of the publishing industry to honor the best books of the year.

Mailer and Ferlinghetti were being honored with medals by the National Book Foundation, the 82-year-old novelist for his "distinguished contribution to American letters" and the Beat generation poet for his "outstanding service to the American literary community."

Morrison, who received the same honor as Mailer in 1996, introduced him as a writer who "was often wrong but always engaged, a true original" and whose books are a critical piece of the history of American literature in the 20th century.

With her long gray hair and colorful robe-like dress, the only African-American woman writer to win a Nobel Prize brought a kind of majesty to a ceremony recently marked by petty squabbling, celebrity inflation and forced jokes.

She suggested that writers of Mailer's "carnivorous intelligence" are few and far between these days. "He was the tallest lightning rod around" in the late 20th century, his work and public presence attracting the various bolts of protest from that troubled time.

Mailer struggled to the Marriott Marquis hotel stage to accept, his trip slowed by unsteady legs supported with two canes.

The image of the powerful Morrison draping the medal around his neck symbolized for just an instant the broad and creative diversity those two writers represent in American literature.

Despite his frail appearance, Mailer was strong in voice and fierce in criticism of the course of today's literature.

"It's a shame in the literary world today that passion has withered, producing fiction that is all too unforgettable," he thundered.

"The light of the Enlightenment is now a flickering light," he continued, adding that he fears literature will soon become "a footnote to our technological and commercial" culture.

Mailer said that he learned about the world from novels: "From Proust, society, from Joyce, language, and from Tolstoy, compassion."

He predicted that he is "watching the disappearance of my trade. The serious novel may be in serious decline."

Readers today would rather read "an egregiously cruel review in The New York Times" than to read the book itself and appreciate the effort and art involved in creating it, he said.

Ferlinghetti offered more of the same pessimism. He launched San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore in 1953, published the controversial Allen Ginsberg poem "Howl" several years later and was charged with breaking obscenity laws.

"In the dumbing-down of America, literature is an endangered species," he claimed. "The barbarians are at the gate, and the now-dominant commercial culture welcomes them."

Ferlinghetti spoke of his generation coming of age in the war years, when the works of Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and other key artists in America's literary world were studied and well known.

"The real mainstream of our culture is the writers, editors, readers, booksellers, universities. They have always been."

He did offer some prospects for the written word, however.

"When nature finally strikes back and there's no electricity, literature will still be there" to entertain and instruct.

The individual awards were somewhat anticlimactic. As expected, Joan Didion's memoir "The Year of Magical Thinking" was named the best nonfiction book of the year, and W.S. Merwin's "Migration" won in the poetry category despite strong entries from other established poets John Ashbery and Frank Bidart.

The one surprise was William Vollman's "Europe Central," which grabbed the fiction honors as though the judges were telling us that long, complex novels were not dead, yet. Vollman's competitors were the previously honored E.L. Doctorow, the much-admired Mary Gaitskell and relative newcomers Rene Steinke and Christopher Sorrentino.

Another newcomer, Jeanne Birdsall, earned the medal for young people's literature for "The Penderwicks." The favorite was the well-established Walter Dean Myers.