Winning the Big Prize

It's Nobel Prize week, with December 10th, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death, being the big day when the prizes are presented to the Laureates. Earlier this week, French novelist Patrick Modiano accepted the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature. In his remarks, he spoke about the novelist's challenging job of evoking the past and the responsibility to "safeguard the succession" of literature.

In the last few years, there has been a lot of chatter about how the Nobel Committee has neglected, or at least not selected, American authors. A story in The New Yorker in October of 2013 entitled "Why Don't More Americans Win the Nobel Prize?" (that's pretty straightforward, eh?) speculates that the European intellectual community still has vestiges of a belief that the American writing scene is something of a literary backwater, not living up to their own centuries-older intellectual heritage. And yet, in fact, since the first American, Sinclair Lewis, won in 1930, a vivid and solidly intellectual American canon has been built.

I've taken a look at the list of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature over the last 113 years to see just how many Americans were nominated (and yes, you Canadians, I know you're even more neglected than we are, but Alice Munro did win last year!).

According to the Nobel website, "the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 107 times to 111 Nobel Laureates, between 1901 and 2014. The last American to win was Toni Morrison in 1993, whom the committee said:  "...in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Prior to that were three Americans who are not native English speakers: Joseph Brodsky in 1987, Czeslaw Milosz in 1980 (he is noted as "also Poland") and Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978.

Here's the complete list:

1930 Sinclair Lewis
1936 Eugene O'Neill
1938 Pearl Buck
1949 William Faulkner
1954 Ernest Hemingway
1962 John Steinbeck
1976 Saul Bellow
1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer
1980 Czeslaw Milosz (also Poland)
1987 Joseph Brodsky
1993 Toni Morrison

There are a number of American writers who are frequently thought to be strong contenders, such as Philip Roth. When asked by The New York Times this past October how he felt about being a repeat non-winner, Roth replied: "I wonder if I had called 'Portnoy's Complaint' 'The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism,' if I would have thereby earned the favor of the Swedish Academy."

I have something of a bias, as American literature is mostly what I read, and I think much of it is excellent, brilliant even. I have my favorite practitioners who are not the obvious ones (Roth, Oates, Pynchon, etc.), usually put up for awards, writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Jayne Anne Phillips, and A.M. Homes (along with some Canadian favorites like Carol Shields and Michael Ondaatje).

American literature, going back to Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists, has a strong tradition of idealism, of seeking to define identity, and of following tradition while in search of the new. Our pioneering spirit plays out decisively in our fiction, and our literary flavor is unique. Let's hope those with the vote in the Swedish Academy soon develop a taste for it.