My Nobel Prizes Part One (1901-1959)

Everything I know and don't know about every winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

It’s been a while since I’ve sent out a newsletter. I know, you know, we all know I can’t do this as regularly as I once did. In the future I hope to return to one Thursday a month. For the time being it will be sporadic. Whenever I can. Sorry. Or you’re welcome. Whichever feels right.

What’s the point?

The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on October 10th 2024. In anticipation I have copied and pasted a list of every winner and annotated it. Some silly. Some serious. Some short. Some long. None interesting.

A lot of people have won the Nobel Prize so it’s divided into two parts. Part two will go out next week. Along with part two I’ll include predictions for who will win this year.

If you’ve got a guess for who will win put it in the comments. Or shoot me an email. Or keep it to yourself. Whatever.

Enjoy!

1901 Sully Prudhomme

I knew Sully landed a plane on the Hudson River. I didn’t know they gave out Nobel Prizes for that. Boi-oi-oing! 

1902 Theodor Mommsen

Never heard of him.

1903 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

His name when translated into English means “Bear’s Star Bear’s Son” or “Bear’s Star Son of Bear.”

Norwegian literature has what they call “the big four.” Henrik Ibsen, Alexander Kielland, Jonas Lie, and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Originally a publishing gimmick. But it stuck. And worked. The term is still used and they remain four of the biggest, most influential writers in Norway. We Americans only know Ibsen. 

Bjørnson is known for being moralistic. Later Nobel boy Knut Hamsun hated him for it. Hamsun gave a lecture denouncing the big four entirely. I read one short story by Bjørnson years ago. Very little of it stuck with me, but I’m fairly certain it was about a farmer (every Norwegian man writes about a farmer), who probably had a brother, and his barn burned down or something. At the time I thought there was a clear and obvious moral, but I can’t recall it. 

Bjørnson having a Nobel Prize and Ibsen not having a Nobel prize demonstrates from the beginning how dumb and pointless these things are.

1904 José Echegaray y Eizaguirre

Never heard of him.

1904    Frédéric Mistral

Mistral is what happens when lawyers do a bad job in court. Boi-oi-oing!

1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz

Never heard of him.

1906 Giosuè Carducci

Never heard of him.

1907 Rudyard Kipling

When I was 18 years old I traveled around New Zealand by working on farms and in gardens in exchange for room and board. Outside Dunedin there was a kind old lady named Bunny, who had a large plot of land. She volunteered for the local botanical garden and once a week went orienteering. Once she said she wanted to invite me but was afraid it would be a bit too intense for an inexperienced guy like me. In her home she had a wall of penguin paperbacks. The ones with orange spines. While she was off orienteering I would read paperbacks. One of those paperbacks was The Jungle Book. At the time I wasn’t very thoughtful and didn’t know anything about colonialism or anything at all. The Jungle Book was good fun.

Years later a punk band named Bagheera played a punk show in a punk house basement. The band made it clear they were named after a pet cat and not the character from The Jungle Book because Rudyard Kipling was bad. They didn’t agree with or respect Rudyard Kipling at all. I felt a little self-conscious and unsure because I remember liking The Jungle Book. They were probably right though.

Nowadays I don’t care. Maybe never did. I can take or leave The Jungle Book. It’s not important to me. Having anger against some guy I barely know anything about requires energy I don’t have. 

If I were to find myself in Bunny’s room full of penguin paperbacks again would I still pick up The Jungle Book? Only the Lord knows. 

1908 Rudolf Christoph Eucken

Eucken is a funny name.

1909 Selma Lagerlöf

For a while I was pretty into the Icelandic Sagas. Since Lagerlöf’s book Gösta Berling’s Saga had saga in the name I thought it would resemble a saga. It didn’t. I’m sure it’s a good book, but I found it dull and now I can’t remember anything about it. At the time I was going to a coffee shop called Bucer’s to read. They had lemon poppyseed muffins I liked to eat. Plus, no one I knew ever went into Bucer’s. In a small town being able to be out in public without seeing people you know is a luxury. Of course no one I knew went to Bucer’s because it’s a deplorable place, so now I feel guilty about it.

If I lived in Moscow, Idaho and reading Gösta Berling’s Saga would I go to Bucer’s to read it? No way.

1910 Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse

The laureate with the most names, perhaps?

1911 Maurice Maeterlinck

Never heard of him.

1912 Gerhart Hauptmann

Never heard of him.

1913 Rabindranath Tagore

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize a lot of people were pointing out that he wasn’t the first songwriter to win. Tagore was. I don’t know enough about him to have an opinion on the matter. 

My first couple weeks in library school I was trying pretty hard to find a job in the library. The Librarian for Asian Studies was hiring an assistant. I interviewed. During the interview I was asked how I’d find information on Tagore. I didn’t know. I didn’t get that job. It all worked out in the end.

Never read Tagore, but I’d like to. 

1915 Romain Rolland

Never heard of him.

1916 Verner von Heidenstam

Never heard of him.

1917 Karl Gjellerup

Never heard of him, but his name looks Scandinavian to me, so I probably should know something. 

UPDATE: He’s Danish. I should read him.

1917    Henrik Pontoppidan

Two Danes in one year. What was going on at the Nobel factory? Pontoppidan doesn’t look like a Scandinavian name. Henrik does. Everything evens out. Pontoppidan is best known for a book called Lucky Per. Modern Library put out a new edition a few years ago that is sitting on my shelf. Haven’t read it.

Is the title a reference point for Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim? Only the Lord knows.

1918 Erik Axel Karlfeldt

Never heard of him.

1919 Carl Spitteler

My daughter is a spitteler. She is 1.5 years old. She produces spittel. Boi-oi-oing!

1920 Knut Hamsun

Hamsun was my guy for several years in my twenties. Hunger was one of my favorite books. A wannabe writer wandering around town acting insane. That was me. At a house party once someone derisively referred to Hamsun’s books as “peasant worship.” He’s not wrong. The idealization of manly physical labor, working with the soil, and self-reliance is disgusting to me. Future Nobel winner Halldor Laxness was disgusted too. So much so he wrote Independent People as lampooning peasant worship. Still, Hamsun can write beautifully. The psychology of deranged men is well observed and insightful and often funny.

I have so many fond memories of reading Hamsun. Waking up one morning outside Kellogg, Idaho having slept under a tree off of a bike path. Sitting in the grass and reading Growth of the Soil while waiting for my friends to wake up. Buying a copy of Wayfarers in “The Book Town of” Fjaerland in Norway and reading it on my flight home. Sitting in a coffee shop downtown and reading Hunger in one sitting. Laying on the floor of my cold studio apartment, ice caked on the inside and outside of the windows reading Victoria. 

Hamsun was a big supporter of Hitler. Wrote a glowing obit for him when he died. Ended up tried and convicted for treason. Spent a couple years in his 80s in jail. People tried to paint him as a senile old man who didn’t know what he was doing. That was offensive to him. To prove he hadn’t lost his mind he wrote a book in prison. He claimed it was his greatest work. As far as I know it’s not been translated into English. If it has, it’s not currently in print. I’ve never read it. Until I do we won’t know for sure if it was his greatest or not. If he lost his mind or not. For now, only the Lord knows.

Hamsun doesn’t mean much to me now, but I’m glad he meant something to me at one point. 

1921 Anatole France

I should know who this is but I don’t. Recognize the name at least.

1922 Jacinto Benavente y Martínez

Never heard of him.

1923 William Butler Yeats

Sometimes (almost always) I get Yeats and Auden confused. Auden I know a little better. Yeats, I heard from my friend in college, who took a class taught by a lecherous Fulbright scholar from Ireland, had his testicles replaced with monkey testicles to remedy impotence. I hope it worked for him.   

1924 Władysław Stanisław Reymont

Never heard of him.

1925 George Bernard Shaw

A few months ago I picked up Saint Joan to read. I didn’t read it though. I put it back on the shelf and read something else.

Back in New Zealand after staying with Bunny I stayed with an elderly couple that ran a bakery, Julie and Nikil. They were both part of Rajneeshpuram in the 80s but met later in life. Before Rajneesh Nikil was one of those guards that people try to make laugh in England. One night we played Rummikub. Nikil told me that I needed to read George Bernard Shaw. Someday I will, Nikil. 

1926 Grazia Deledda

Never heard of her.

1927 Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson was a big part of my Master’s thesis. It’s weird to me that he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When I think of Bergson and literature I think of Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, who both responded to Bergson in their books. Maybe Joyce did too? There’s a scene in The Sound and the Fury where Quintin goes to a watchmaker to get a watch fixed. He remarks, “Clocks slay time.” To me this sums up Bergson pretty well. What clocks measure isn’t time. Clocks measure physical distance. The amount the earth moves in a given day. Time, on the other hand (clock pun), is experiential. It can’t be measured. There is forever a discrepancy between how time is experienced and how it is measured. The measurement kills the experience, is what I think Faulkner was saying.

Bergson also has a book about religious experience. In it he suggests that loving a person or a community requires a categorically different kind of love than loving, say, all mankind as Christianity asks folks to do. So it isn’t a question of having enough love, it’s a question of having a particular type of love. What that love looks like, I don’t know. Still, the distinction has been useful to me. 

It’s my contention that Bergson was an unrecognized influence on Gertrude Stein. She borrowed language and imagery from one of his lectures in one of her lectures. Something about how the proof of life was movement and if you looked closely enough everything was moving. Everything is alive. Everything living thing has a stake in existence. We have a responsibility to recognize, consider, and take seriously every living thing’s, everything’s stake in existence.

Gertrude Stein thought children should vote. Who am I to disagree?

1928 Sigrid Undset

I feel compelled to say she’s my favorite Nobel Prize winner, but it’s not true. Perhaps the most underrated Nobel Prize winner that I’m familiar with. Historical fiction isn’t something I’m generally drawn to, most editions of the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy have questionable covers, and I’ve read the first English translation, which is still readily available in most used bookstores I’ve ever visited, tried to exorcize modernist aesthetics to make it read more medieval. However, Tiina Nunnally’s translation is beautiful. The struggle between Christian beliefs and lingering paganism. Kristin’s transformation from a young wayward woman to a witchy old mother is the best I’ve seen. 

Undset also wrote a saga. Unlike Lagerlöf’s it evokes the Icelandic Sagas. She wrote it because there had been a recent rise in nationalism, which included reclaiming the vikings as noble heritage. Undset, like any of us would, found this concerning. So in response she wrote a novel intended to demonstrate how the viking way of life was not one we should emulate or admire. She made efforts to use historically accurate language. So words that wouldn’t have entered Norwegian at the time the novel was set were not used in the novel. 

I’m not sure she really succeeded in ending nationalist impulses and their admiration for vikings, but she wrote a great novel. If you take anything from this newsletter it is “read Kristen Lavransdatter!”   

Tiina Nunnally recently translated Undset’s The Master of Hestviken tetralogy. The first new translation since 1928. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. I haven’t read it yet. Maybe we should all read it together?

1929 Thomas Mann

Something tells me this guy is overrated. Death in Venice is the only thing I’ve read by him. It was good. Magic Mountain is a book I’d like to read and will probably love when I do read it. Whenever that happens I’ll come back and amend this section. Until then I’m standing by it. Thomas Mann is overrated.  

1930 Sinclair Lewis

In high school I had a mass market paperback copy of The Jungle by Sinclair Lewis. I have a vivid memory of sitting next to the volleyball court in East City Park trying to read it. It was hard to get into. I never finished it. A couple weeks ago I was looking at my bookshelf because I wanted to read something by Sinclair Lewis. I had just watched There Will Be Blood for the first time and I wanted to read the book. I don’t own any Sinclair Lewis and I don’t know what happened to my old mass market paperback. 

UPDATE: Everything written above is about Upton Sinclair. Who’s Sinclair Lewis?

1931 Erik Axel Karlfeldt

Apparently this guy declined the prize when he was first offered it. After he died they gave it to him posthumously. Seems kinda fucked up to me. 

1932 John Galsworthy

Is this the Forsyte Saga guy? I feel like I always see those in ugly hardbound editions at antique stores.

1933 Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin

Never heard of him.

1934 Luigi Pirandello

Never heard of him.

1936 Eugene O'Neill

Used to love the Katherine Hepburn movie of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It’s a phrase I say regularly. Read the play in college. Liked it a lot. Bought a Dover Thrift edition of another one of his plays but never read it. 

1937 Roger Martin du Gard

Never heard of him.

1938 Pearl Buck

Having lived and worked in West Virginia, I saw and heard the name Pearl Buck a lot. Something to do with China? I don’t know.

1939 Frans Eemil Sillanpää

One of the most Finnish names I’ve seen. How many Nobel laureates does Finland have?

1944 Johannes V. Jensen

Never heard of him.

1945 Gabriela Mistral

I’ll think of another Mistral joke and put it here. Maybe a pun on minstrel instead of mistrial. Suggestions?

1946 Hermann Hesse

Hesse has a book of fairytales. That’s the only thing I’ve read by him. Read it in New Zealand.

1947 André Gide

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of “Document Theory” and whenever document theory is applied to literature Gide comes up. Wait, I’m confusing him with Breton. Gide does come up, but not every time.

1948 T.S. Eliot

There was a time when I felt like I really didn’t understand any poetry and I really wanted to. To try to teach myself poetry I read a bunch of T.S. Eliot. Still I don’t feel like I understand any poetry, but I really liked reading T.S. Eliot. 

1949 William Faulkner

For four or five years every summer I would read a book by William Faulkner. Reading one book a year is a pretty good way to familiarize yourself with a challenging writer, imho. So many nice memories with his books. I rode my bike to Troy, Idaho and had lunch at some weird little diner while reading Light in August. At a work white elephant gift exchange I was given Go Down, Moses. Most of Absalom, Absalom was read in Rainbow Bakery in Bloomington, Indiana. The first time I ever read Faulkner, though, was back at Bunny’s house outside Dunedin, New Zealand. She had a penguin paperback of Sanctuary. At that point all I knew about Faulkner was that he was really difficult. I read that book and didn’t get it. It wasn’t so difficult. It didn’t feel too different from To Kill A Mockingbird, which is probably an embarrassing comparison, but it’s what I thought at the time.

Having lived most my life and attended college in Idaho, Hemingway has always been a big deal. Latching onto Faulkner was my pretentious rebellion.

1950 Bertrand Russell

I’ve heard of him.

1951 Pär Lagerkvist

The Dwarf and Barabas are great. The Dwarf is funny. Barabas will make you cry. It follows Barabas for a day or so after being released from prison in exchange for the crucifixion of Jesus. Lately I’ve been thinking about revisiting both.  

1952 François Mauriac

Never heard of him.

1953 Sir Winston Churchill

Did he write books?

1954 Ernest Hemingway

Growing up in Idaho, especially for a bookish boy, Hemingway is inescapable. He’ll always be special to me. Even if I don’t like him that much.

1955 Halldór Laxness

Earlier I said I wanted to say Sigrid Undset was my favorite Nobel winner. Laxness might be the true answer, but I’m not sure. Independent People was my favorite book for years. If I have a favorite book anymore it might still be Independent People. I don’t know. A man in Iceland works for years to have enough money to buy his own land and start his own farm. Being one’s own master is true freedom. The farmer is hellbent on exercising his independence. He won’t accept any help from anybody. He needs to be self-reliant and self-made. It completely destroys his life and his family. At the end he eats a piece of stolen bread offered to him by communists. It sounds minor, but it’s beautiful. Truly moving.

As I mentioned with Hamsun, Independent People was written in response to Growth of the Soil. In Growth Hamsun uncritically praises the self-made success of the farmer. It’s clear that Hamsun believes people should be independent and they should work hard and it will pay off. Laxness knows better. People can’t survive independently. It’s foolish and harmful to try. Independent People is the funniest, most beautifully written, and moving family saga.

So many great heartbreaking parts. Bjartur, the farmer, goes off looking for a lost sheep in a snowstorm. He gathers strength by reciting Skaldic poetry to himself. Meanwhile his wife is dying in childbirth alone in their house during a snowstorm.

Bjartur hires a teacher for his kids. The teacher teaches them math and history and religion. One child asks if God created everything, why did God create sin. The teacher responds, “Sin is one of God’s greatest gifts.” Who am I to disagree?

The teacher sleeps with Bjartur’s oldest daughter. The next morning she has her version of a Molly Bloom monologue. Gut wrenching.

Laxness wrote other books. Good ones even. Funny ones too. Wayward Heroes lampoons arrogant war loving men during the cold war, by employing two boys who love the Sagas too much and travel around Iceland wanting to battle and murder for honor and poetry. Everyone thinks they’re a joke because the Viking Age is over. No one does that anymore. No one respects it. They are living by an outdated code of ethics. Hilarious!

The Atom Station is somehow about the U.S. using nuclear bombs during World War Two and setting up a military base in Iceland a couple years after they gained their independence from Denmark, also during World War Two.

Some people think World Light is his masterpiece. It was a Dickensian story about a poor boy living in abusive squalor finding hope and comfort in poetry. It didn’t do it for me.

Iceland’s Bell is set in the middle ages. That’s all I can remember.

Paradise Reclaimed is about a poor Icelandic farmer becoming Mormon. It or Under the Glacier are the best after Independent People.

Nothing compares to Independent People though. 

1956 Juan Ramón Jiménez

Never heard of him.

1957 Albert Camus

I read The Stranger in high school and The Myth of Sisyphus in college. Always felt like I should read more, know more about him. He’s one of those writers I admire without actually knowing much about. 

In 2008 a friend who I met while in New Zealand visited me in Idaho. We went to Brused Books in Pullman, Washington. He bought a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus. I remember him and I disagreeing on the definition of absurd and lightly arguing about it in the bookstore.

Later that night we went to my neighbor’s house to watch John McCain debate Barack Obama on TV. Talk about absurd!

1958 Boris Leonidovich Pasternak

I recognize his name. Apparently he declined the award. What a rebel.

1959 Salvatore Quasimodo

I didn’t know they gave out Nobel prizes for ringing bells in Notre Dame. Boi-oi-oing!

***

Stay tuned for next week’s edition of Most Useful Information where I leak even more useful information about every Nobel Prize in Literature winner.