Nobel Prize Snippets

Stewart

Stewart

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I'm currently working on a little Nobel project and part of that is trying to find out the exact dates each prize was announced. This is involving me digging into UK newspaper archives for mentions of reports, and I just thought, as I do so, that it would be cool to post up any little snippets I find that may be interesting.

Here's one I found about Grazia Deledda from the Dundee Evening Telegraph on 16th November, 1927, since she was awarded the 1926 prize a year later. Bernard Shaw, the 1925 laureate, was awarded in 1926. This is because in 1925 none of the nominations were worthy enough to win the prize and so it carried over a year. Seems the same happened the following year putting it out of sync for a couple of years. It was resolved in 1928 when both Henri Bergson and Sigrid Undset were recognised, for 1927 and 1928 respectively.

NOBEL PRIZEWINNER'S PLANS

Signora Grazia Deledda, the Italian novelist, who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, says that she will devote the prize, which amounts to between £5000 and £6000, to the economic necessities of her family.

Signora Deledda is not rich. Although she has written a score of books, she has received very little from her publishers, and is by no means independent of the income of her husband, who is employed in Rome. They have three children, and much as she appreciates the action of Mr Bernard Shaw in declining the prize money, she points out that he is a rich man.

Her husband says that [she] has been a candidate for ten years. She will go to Stockholm to receive the prize.
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Shaw didn't outright reject the prize, it seems, but donated it the foundation of the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation.
 
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Stewart

Stewart

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In 1922, six years before her Nobel Prize win, Sigrid Undset was bestowed a literary pension by the Norwegian Parliament.
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Belfast News-Letter, 14 November, 1928​
 
Stewart

Stewart

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LEWIS AND NOBEL PRIZE
To Use it to Support Author’s Family

Mr. Sinclair Lewis, the well-known American author, was delighted when informed that had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1930. Mr. Lewis, who refused to accept the 1,000 dollar (£200) Pulitzer Award 1926 for his book Martin Arrowsmith,” when asked whether he would take the Nobel Prize (valued at about £6,500) said: "You may state that I will accept this award. l am happy to learn of this high recognition."

Mr. Lewis announces that he will use the proceeds of the prize to support a well-known young American author and his family in a manner that enable him to continue writing. There is at preeent no indication as to the identity the author whom Mr. Lewis has in mind.

The total sales of Mr. Lewis's last five bestsellers amounted to 1,300,000 copies of which Main Street ’ accounted for 525,000 copies. Mr. Lewis, who is 45, married Miss Dorothy Thompson, a well-known American woman journalist, in London in May, 1928.
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Northern Whig, 6 November, 1930​

It looks like the author was Thomas Wolfe, though I can't say for certain. The Daily Herald five years later, on 22nd August 1935, reports:

In the pugnacious speech with which he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, Sinclair Lewis went out of his way to prophesy generously about the future of a young and, at that time, not too-well-known fellow author, Thomas Wolfe.

"He may have a chance," he said, "to be the greatest American writer. . . .In fact, I do not see why he should not be one of the greatest world writers. That's the way Wolfe shapes to me."

In the previous year the young man's first novel had been published on the other side of the Atlantic. It was called Look Homeward, Angel, and it told in lyrical, often flamboyant, but always powerful fashion, of a strange, stormy family of Southerners, the Gants, during the period 1884-1920.
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From Sinclair's Nobel Lecture, where he names two future laureates:

I have, for the future of American literature, every hope and every eager belief. We are coming out, I believe, of the stuffiness of safe, sane, and incredibly dull provincialism. There are young Americans today who are doing such passionate and authentic work that it makes me sick to see that I am a little too old to be one of them.

There is Ernest Hemingway, a bitter youth, educated by the most intense experience, disciplined by his own high standards, an authentic artist whose home is in the whole of life; there is Thomas Wolfe, a child of, I believe, thirty or younger, whose one and only novel, Look Homeward, Angel, is worthy to be compared with the best in our literary production, a Gargantuan creature with great gusto of life; there is Thornton Wilder, who in an age of realism dreams the old and lovely dreams of the eternal romantics; there is John Dos Passos, with his hatred of the safe and sane standards of Babbitt and his splendor of revolution; there is Stephen Benét, who to American drabness has restored the epic poem with his glorious memory of old John Brown; there are Michael Gold, who reveals the new frontier of the Jewish East Side, and William Faulkner, who has freed the South from hoopskirts; and there are a dozen other young poets and fictioneers, most of them living now in Paris, most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
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Thomas Wolfe died in 1938, aged 37.
 
Stewart

Stewart

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Patrick Murtha said:
^ That was a nice and generous lecture. I love Thomas Wolfe, although he is not currently “in fashion”.
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Penguin repackaged him a few year ago with the latest 'Penguin Modern Classics' look in the UK. Two books: Look Homeward, Angel and its sequel, though I forget its name.
 
Patrick Murtha

Patrick Murtha

Reader
That would be Of Time and the River. Look Homeward, Angel has also been published in a longer, restored-from-manuscript version as O Lost. Of course it is pretty long to begin with. ?

An obscure piece of Wolfiana that I recommend is his whopping big play Welcome to Our City, never produced or published in his lifetime. As the title suggests, it gives a panoramic view of the modern urban South.

David Herbert Donald’s biography of Wolfe, Look Homeward, is majestic.

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B

Ben Jackson

Well-known member
For the more recent winners, say the winners since 1975, both the New York Times and Washington Post can be very helpful. For example, you can goggle Gunter Grass 1999 Nobel Prize Washington Post and you'll get what you're looking for.

It's a brilliant idea you've. I must commend your efforts.
 
Cleanthess

Cleanthess

Dinanukht wannabe
Stewart said:
Northern Whig, 6 November, 1930​

It looks like the author was Thomas Wolfe, though I can't say for certain. The Daily Herald five years later, on 22nd August 1935, reports:



From Sinclair's Nobel Lecture, where he names two future laureates:



Thomas Wolfe died in 1938, aged 37.
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An excellent list of what was most promising in American fiction at the time of the lecture. Mr. Lewis had taste. Even a writer not so famous now, Michael Gold, wrote Jews without Money, which was a big deal at the time. I think Mr. Lewis was alluding to Gertrude Stein when he mentioned the Parisian-based followers of Joyce.
 
Patrick Murtha

Patrick Murtha

Reader
“Go tell Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself."

Now Mike was a feisty guy, doctrinaire Stalinist, attacked everyone, hated and was hated back. One shudders to think of him on social media.

Re the above quotation, Gold had attacked Hemingway for not being far left enough in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Most of Gold’s exchanges with other writers (James T. Farrell, for example) were like this.
 
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