So do you think the Nobel Prize people have selected an outstanding group of authors? (the list is easy to find - List of Nobel laureates in Literature - Wikipedia for one). Have you read many of them?
Have you ever read an author because he or she was a Nobel Laureate? Do you think there are any total duds?
I admit I was prompted to start this by this article http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/05/jrr-tolkien-nobel-prize?CMP=twt_gu , wherein the Nobel committee trashed Tolkien as a writer. Which is fine; I still love LOTR. But it started me thinking about Nobel winners, so would be interested in y’alls thoughts.
I like Hemingway, Kipling and Steinbeck. “The Good Earth”, “Beloved”, “Siddhartha” and “Lord of the Flies” were all right. Yeats’s poetry I can take or leave. That’s about all I’ve read.
I’ve read at least something from about a dozen authors on that list. Of them, Thomas Mann is my favorite. There’s an embarrassing number I haven’t even heard of though.
My impression is that the literature committee has delivered a really mixed bag of prize winners over the years, but I haven’t read enough of them to say if that’s a fair assessment.
This is a complete-ish list of the Nobel prize-winning stuff I’ve read. What actually comes to mind is that I read too many of these when I was too young, so I’m left not remembering a lot of them very well and I wonder how much I understood. That’s frustrating. But I can say that I like Hemingway’s writing very much and I’m annoyed I still haven’t gotten around to reading his novels. I’m also a big fan of Eliot, Beckett, and Steinbeck. There’s not much here that I really disliked, but I didn’t like The Bluest Eye and I really hated reading Mourning Becomes Electra.
Lewis (Babbitt)
Pirandello (read Six Characters in Search of an Author)
O’Neill (Moon for the Misbegotten and Mourning Becomes Electra)
Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)
Eliot (Prufrock, The Hollow Men, and The Wasteland)
Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)
Hemingway (short stories - I know I’ve read Hills Like White Elephants, Big Two Hearted River, and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber for starters)
Steinbeck (Travels with Charley, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl)
Sartre (No Exit)
Beckett (seen Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, Act I & II Without Words, Happy Days)
Bellow (Henderson The Rain King)
Morrison (The Bluest Eye)
Pinter (I’ve read The Dumb Waiter and seen The Caretaker performed)
Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)
In the past year I’ve gone looking for prize winning authors to read (Nobel, Pulitzer, Booker), so yes I do use that as a criteria. From a quick scan, I’ve read works from 8 of the Nobel authors and have books from a few more on my Kindle waiting for me to read. I’ve read 5 of the Pulitzer winners from the past couple of decades and 3 of the last dozen Booker winners. It beats reading the slushpile.
Hemingway entered the public domain here in Canada this year, so I’m looking forward to getting my hands on digital versions of his stuff soon.
I’ve read quite a few. Hemingway and Steinbeck are up there for me, and I’m a big fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I’m a Steinbeck fan - Travels with Charley, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and my favorites: Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday.
I stopped reading *The Pearl *about halfway through. I decided I didn’t want to witness everything he was laying on the diver. Seemed like some sort of, well, social and class-driven torture porn. The Wayward Bus didn’t do it for me either, though it wasn’t painful like The Pearl, just dull.
I’ve always thought of the Nobel Prize for Literature as being given to generally obscure authors, and not being a really good list for identifying great works of literature.
That said, I’m surprised to find that I’ve actually read at least 18 of the winning authors, and that several of their works are among my favorites.
Rudyard Kipling
W.B. Yeats (wrote my favorite poem, “The Second Coming”)
George Bernard Shaw
Thomas Mann
Sinclair Lewis (was a little obsessed with him at one point – have read many of his books)
Pearl Buck
Hermann Hesse
Andre Gide (love The Counterfeiters)
T.S. Eliot
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
Albert Camus
Boris Pasternak
John Steinbeck (another one I worked my way through at one point – love East of Eden; The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle)
Jean-Paul Sartre (No Exit has stuck with me for my whole life)
Saul Bellow
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (love 100 Years of Solitude)
William Golding
I’m sure I’ve read short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, but since I can’t recall or identify any particular one, I’ve left him off the list. I think it helps to have taken a ridiculous number of novels courses, although not all of the works I’ve read were school assignments.
I’ve read these winners:
Kipling
Yeats
Shaw
Henri Bergson (though just his essay on the origins of humor)
Lewis (a favorite)
Pirandello
O’Neill
Hesse
Gide
Eliot
Bellow
Garcia Marquez (love, love, love his work)
Golding
Morrison
Grass
Pinter
Vargas Llosa
Hemingway (who I detest)
Camus (another favorite)
Pasternak
Sartre
Beckett (another big favorite)
Solzhenitsyn (favorite, too)
Boll
well he’s back, I’ve read quite a few authors on the list, but in response to your third question: I read only one author because he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk. First I read “Istanbul: Memories and the City”, then all of his books available in French or English translations.
My high school English class covered the American Nobel winners, and being the drama guy, I was assigned Eugene O’Neill. As with Tennessee Williams, I thought he brought an amazing level of craft to tell stories not worth telling. Listening to the kids’ reports on Sinclair Lewis, though, fascinated me, and I read some of his books, loving his sarcasm and satire.
I just recently re-read It Can’t Happen Here, and it spurred me to get around to doing something I’ve wanted to do for decades. I spent years fruitlessly searching for four of his first five novels. Now, thanx to the Internet, they’re easily available to read, so I’m going through them, along with a biography.
Steinbeck’s a little too condescendingly populist for my taste; Faulkner’s impenetrable; Hemingway found a way to do with literature as Picasso did with art, so he could get done with it in a hurry and go out schmoozing with people who’d publicize him. But the now rather discredited Lewis still has an understanding and humor that really gets to the heart.
It is curious to me why no Nobels were awarded in 1940, 1941, 1942 and 1943 but WERE awarded in 1944 and 1945. If the break was because of World War II, why award in '44 and '45?