Since the Nobel Prize for Literature was first awarded in 1901, ten American authors have won it. The first was Sinclair Lewis, who won the prize in 1930, hard on the heels of his satirical expose of religious hypocrisy, Elmer Gantry (Lewis, who had earlier refused to accept the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, intimated that Theodore Dreiser would have been a more appropriate inaugural American laureate). The others are Eugene O'Neill (1936), Pearl Buck (1938), T.S. Eliot (1948), William Faulkner (1949), Ernest Hemingway (1954), John Steinbeck (1962), Saul Bellow (1976), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978), and Toni Morrison (1993). Over the weekend, I found myself reading their acceptance speeches, which are transcribed on the Nobel web site. Hemingway's speech, which was read by the American ambassador as he was too ill to attend the banquet held in his honor, struck me particularly:

Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.

Hemingway recorded the speech later; you can listen to him reading it here.

Toni Morrison got that sucker, and Stephen King didn't. Where's the justice?

Just kidding.

Since you brought up Hemingway, I'll say what I've been meaning to say for some time.

What is missing from most English departments is the masculine adventure and action writing that Hemingway exemplifies. He was, of course, the butt of the joke during the PC era. The passive writers so prized by theorists and ideologues are just plain boring to read. Postmodernism is, in an odd way, an insistence that action does not really matter.

You will know that the political and moral climate has shifted 180 degrees when that other great lion of American writing, Henry Miller, comes back into vogue in the English department.

thanks for posting - his views apply to writing of a non-lit type, too (science, for example).

I would include Isaac Bashevis Singer amongst your American nobel laureates (awarded in 1978). Yes, he wrote in Yiddish, and yes, his stories take place in pre-war Warsaw and other Eastern European locales.... but:

At the time Singer was writing, he could only do so with complete freedom (and renumeration) in the United States. He was not persecuted here for his beliefs, and his stories about New York City are excellent - and deceiving in their simplicity and clarity. He spent time in Canada, yet his stories about the magic of America - and, in particular, what happens when (new) Americans interact with people from the old world - are terrific. He also gave a
great Nobel speech (my favorite excerpt):

There are five hundred reasons why I began to write for children, but to save time I will mention only ten of them. Number 1) Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about the critics. Number 2) Children don't read to find their identity. Number 3) They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. Number 4) They have no use for psychology. Number 5) They detest sociology. Number 6) They don't try to understand Kafka or Finnegans Wake. Number 7) They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff. Number 8) They love interesting stories, not commentary, guides, or footnotes. Number 9) When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority. Number 10) They don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions.

My mistake! That's what I get for posting at six in the morning. I've edited the post to include Singer. Thanks for bringing the oversight to my attention.

I used to eat breakfast with Singer in a dingy little coffee shop on Broadway and 87th St. many years ago. Technically speaking we weren't eating together, we just happened to share the same counter every now and again. :) To just about everyone he was another elderly, nameless faceless New Yorker and to those that knew of him - they all pretended he was a faceless New Yorker. I never talked to him. I can't read any of his work without thinking of him sitting there quietly eating his breakfast.
Ivan

You never talked to him ??? !!!

I would have.

Come to think of it, though, how good was his English? Did he write anything in English, or was it all written in Yiddish and translated?

Hi Laura,

I may have asked him to pass the ketchup once. :)

It is kind of an unwritten rule in New York (although not universally honored) that one simply pretend that no one notices anyone else, least of all celebrities. I think that may have changed by now. . . .

For forty years I.B. Singer ate the same breakfast (a boiled potato) almost every morning at the American restaurant, a diner on the corner of 85th and Broadway (it is now a restaurant called "French Roast" where the same sandwich that once cost $2.50 retails for $5.75 because it arrives on a baguette). He lived in the Belnord, one of Manhattan's oldest apartment buildings (the entire block, 86 to 87, Broadway to Amsterdam, built in 1906) and he would occasionally stroll around the Belnord's courtyard and the block. He was unfailingly polite to people who spoke to him, and the one time I told him how much I appreciated his work he thanked me with a slight (forced?) smile.

M2,
We must have been neighbors. Thanks for correcting me on the St. I lived on 88th & Bdway (over the old Red Apple supermarket and New Yorker theater - which must be long gone now) - so 85th sounds right as it was right near the #1 train exit.