The Nobel Prize for Literature - how many authors have you read?

[CaptainCanada]

Of the five bequests of Alfred Nobel, this is probably the most subjective one, even more than the Peace Prize. They've given out 102 of these things as of this writing, to many of the brightest minds of the age, and a bunch of people whose names I can't even pronounce: How many have you read something from?

1. Rudyard Kipling (1907) – various poems.
2. W. B. Yeats (1923) – various poems.
3. George Bernard Shaw (1925) – Pygmalion, The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman
4. Thomas Mann (1929) – Death in Venice
5. T. S. Eliot (1948) – various poems.
6. Sir Winston Churchill (1953) – The History of the English Speaking Peoples v.1-4
7. John Steinbeck (1962) – Of Mice and Men
8. Heinrich Boll (1972) – And Never Said a Word
9. Saul Bellow (1976) – Ravelstein
10. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982) – One Hundred Years of Solitude
11. Sir William Golding (1983) – Lord of the Flies

So that puts me at 10.7% of the total.

 

[Annoiu]

30

Nearly all the ones who wrote in English and a handful of the others in translation.

I've some how missed out on reading Golding and Bellow. Maybe I'll remedy that someday. Not right now though.

 

[Roger Wilco]

My grandfather had a very nice anthology of all Nobel Price winners up until 1994 or so (one volume for each winner), I think it was even published by the Nobel Prize comittee, and I at least tried to read all of them.
I can't get through most of the poetry stuff though.

 

[Admiral Shran]

Damn, I've only read three....

1.) Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
2.) Albert Camus - The Plague
3.) William Golding - Lord of the Flies

2.9% Now I have a mission - got to get reading.

 

[The Boy Who Cried Worf]

Eugene O'Neil - The Emperor Jones
Herman Hesse - Siddartha
William Faulkner - Sound and the Fury, Short Stories
Bertrand Russell - Number of his philosophy works
Ernest Hemingway - Sun Also Rises, Short Stories
Albert Camus - The Stranger
John Steinbeck - The Chrysanthemums
Jean Paul Sartre - No Exit, Humanism and Existentialism
Samuel Becket - Waiting For Godot
Issac Singer - Gimpel The Fool
William Golding - Lord of the Flies
Toni Morrison - Sula

 

[StolenThunder]

Not nearly enough - TS Eliot, John Steinbeck, Kenzaburo Oe, Jose Saramago, Gunter Grass. Having said that, I've barely read anything for pleasure in the past five years - something to pick up again now university is finished.

 

[Count Zero]

I'm also counting the plays I've seen, not read.

Theodor Mommsen (1902) - excerpts from his works
Rudyard Kipling (1907) - The Jungle Book
Gerhart Hauptmann (1912) - Vor Sonnenuntergang
Thomas Mann (1929) - almost everything, he's my favourite writer
Hermann Hesse (1946) - Unterm Rad, Siddharta, Der Steppenwolf, Das Glasperlenspiel
François Mauriac (1952) - Thérèse Desqueyroux, Le Mystère Frontenac
Ernest Hemingway (1954) - The Old Man and the Sea, The Snows of Kilimanjaro
Albert Camus (1957) - L'Etranger, La Peste
John Steinbeck (1962) - Of Mice and Men
Jean-Paul Sartre (1964) - Le Mur, Huis Clos
Samuel Beckett (1969) - Waiting for Godot
Heinrich Böll (1972) - Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum and various short stories
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982) - One Hundred Years of Solitued (never finished it, though)
William Golding (1983) - Lord of the Flies
Günter Grass (1999) - Katz und Maus, Die Blechtrommel

So, 15 out of 102. I should do a lot more reading.

 

[Stevil2001]

1. Rudyard Kipling (1907) - The Jungle Book, scattered bits of poetry
2. William Butler Yeats (1923) - Cathleen Ní Houlihan, Purgatory, numerous poems
3. George Bernard Shaw (1925) - Pygmalion, Candida, The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Captain Brassbound's Conversion
4. Thomas Mann (1929) - Buddenbrooks (one of my favorite ever novels!), some short stories
5. Eugene O'Neill (1936) - Anna Christie, The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape
6. Pearl S. Buck (1938) - The Good Earth
7. Herman Hesse (1946) - The Glass Bead Game, Narcissus and Goldmund, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf
8. T. S. Eliot (1948) - scattered poetry
9. William Faulkner (1949) - As I Lay Dying
10. Ernest Hemingway (1954) - The Old Man and the Sea, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
11. John Steinbeck (1962) - Of Mice and Men
12. Samuel Beckett (1969) - Waiting for Godot
13. Pablo Neruda (1971) - scattered poetry (also I saw Il Postino, which is about him-- does that count?)
14. Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) - Enemies, A Love Story
15. Wole Soyinka (1986) - The Strong Breed
16. Toni Morrison (1993) - Song of Solomon, Beloved, The Bluest Eye
17. J. M. Coetzee (2003) - Waiting for the Barbarians
18. Doring Lessing (2007) - I actually just finished the third book in her sf series, Canopus in Argos: Archives, fifteen minutes ago, and am about to start book four!

More than I thought, but not as many as I'd've liked. I'll work on it whenever I finish reading every novel that's won the Booker.

 

[Marten]

Rudyard Kippling, Selma Lagerlöf, T.S Eliot, John Steinbeck, Pablo Neruda (Very little), Harry Martinsson, William Golding.

Just below 7%. Not that good, but I do have some time to catch up on.

 

[stj]

Including a single story or poem or novel or extensive quotation in other works:

Mommsen, Sienkiewicz, Kipling, Maeterlinck, Tagore, France, Yeats, Shaw, Bergson, Mann, Lewis, Galsworthy, Bunin, Pirandello, O'Niell, Buck, Hesse, Gide, Eliot, Faulkner, Russell, Churchill, Hemingway, Camus, Pasternak, Steinbeck, Steinbeck, Beckett, Sartre, Solzhenitsyn, Neruda, Singer, Marquez, Gordimer, Morrison, Heaney, Pinter and Lessing.

I'm pretty sure that most people have seen a Pinter screenplay even if they didn't realize it. Would someone watching Christopher Walken talk about his father's mustache in The Comfort of Strangers think," Nobel Laueate!"?

No, I haven't read Golding or Bellow.

Most of these I've read just one famous story or poem or novel, like Sienkiewicz' Quo Vadis. Yeats, Shaw, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Russell, Churchill are exceptions for obvious reasons. The only one I've read extensively who wasn't pointed my way by school was Nadine Gordimer, I'm just not a literary person, sorry.

 

[nevermore]

I'm including plays I've seen. A lot of these were required reading in high school; then I majored in English and Philosophy...

1. Kipling (Jungle Book, Just So Stories, various poems)
2. Yeats (various poems)
3. Shaw (Candida, Pygmalion, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism)
4. Mann (Tristan, Death in Venice, Doctor Faustus, The Black Swan)
5. O'Neill (The Hairy Ape, All God's Chillun Got Wings, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night)
6. Hesse (Siddhartha)
7. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock [my favorite poem], The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Tradition and the Individual Talent, various other essays)
8. Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Go Down, Moses, various short stories)
9. Russell (On Denoting, The Problems of Philosophy, The Analysis of Mind, What I Believe, Why I Am Not a Christian, etc.)
10. Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, various short stories)
11. Camus (The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, The Silent Men, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Crisis of Man, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death)
12. Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago, various poems)
13. Steinbeck (Tortilla Flat, The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row)
14. Sartre (Nausea, The Wall, No Exit, The Age of Reason, The Transcendence of the Ego, Being and Nothingness, Existentialism is a Humanism, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Anti-Semite and Jew)
15. Beckett (Waiting for Godot)
16. Solzhenitsyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago)
17. Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
18. Golding (Lord of the Flies)
19. Morrison (Song of Solomon, Jazz)
20. Grass (The Tin Drum)

So, 20%. I'm ok with that.

 

[Count Zero]

Doris Lessing has written science fiction?? Is it any good? I'll definetely check it out if it is.

 

[Stevil2001]

Doris Lessing has written science fiction?? Is it any good? I'll definetely check it out if it is.

Supposedly she's the only sf author to ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I don't think that's true-- The Glass Bead Game is definitely sf, for example.

They're weird books. She has a nicely positive attitude towards sf for a "literary author"-- better than, say, Margaret Atwood or Jeanette Winterson, who tell you that what they write isn't sf because it isn't crap about spaceships. It's about a number of galactic empires that have been secretly influencing Earth throughout its history-- the benevolent Canopeans, the mildly antagonistic Sirians, the evil Shammatians.

All of the books (at least the first three) are framed as in-universe documents, which makes their points kinda hard to get hold of. Do you take them at face value? Or do you consider that they're ostensibly written for certain audiences with certain perspectives who have a vested interest in what you're reading about? And if you do (and you probably should), then what "really" happened?

The first one (with the amazing title Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta: Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by Johor (George Sherban), Emissary (Grade 9), 87th of the Period of the Last Days) is a bit dry, with too many historical documents. I think the second, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (As Narrated by the Chroniclers of Zone Three), is the best of the first three-- some parts are amazing insights into romantic relationships, others leave you scratching your head. The third (The Sirian Experiments: The Report by Ambien II, of the Five) is good, probably better than the first since it has a more personal take on events. I'm only a dozen pages into the fourth, so we'll see.

They remind me of Ursula Le Guin in some ways-- the Canopean Empire in particular bears a resemblance to Le Guin's Ekumen. Anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canopus_in_Argos

 

[Harvey]

I've read Yeats, Eliot, Churchill, Hemingway, Camus, Steinbeck, Sartre, Golding, and Morrison. A few of those, only briefly.

 

[auntiehill]

I've read about 18 of them--many of them while I was in college.

Hmmm. I need to brush up on my reading some. This list is a good place to start.

 

[Nerys Myk]

1. Rudyard Kipling
2. William Butler Yeats
3. George Bernard Shaw
4. Sinclair Lewis
5. Eugene O'Neill
6. Pearl S. Buck
7. Hermann Hesse
8. T. S. Eliot
9. William Faulkner
10. Bertrand Russell
11. John Steinbeck
12. Saul Bellow
13. Gabriel García Márquez
14. William Golding
15. Toni Morrison

 

[Count Zero]

Thanks for the detailed answer, Steve Mollmann. I suppose you could interpret Hesse's Glass Bead Game as science fiction, though it never occurred to me to do so. Apart from the contemplative society, the world in that book doesn't differ from the real one (at the time). At least, that's how I remember it. It's been ages since I read that book.

 

[stj]

Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here can also be considered a science fiction novel in the political novel genre. It is too serious and somber to be widely regarded as satire, and has never fit comfortably into critics' views, though.

 

[Teelie]

Only 10 I recognized. It is a subjective field though, for good reason. Some of the works that are famous now were flops then and vice versa. Only a few people ever make a long-lasting impression in the literary world and it takes decades, sometimes centuries to find out who that would be.

 

[Stevil2001]

Thanks for the detailed answer, Steve Mollmann. I suppose you could interpret Hesse's Glass Bead Game as science fiction, though it never occurred to me to do so. Apart from the contemplative society, the world in that book doesn't differ from the real one (at the time). At least, that's how I remember it. It's been ages since I read that book.

My memory of the book is pretty weak, too (I read it in high school and don't think I fully "got" it), but I do remember that it takes place in the future if nothing else!

Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here can also be considered a science fiction novel in the political novel genre. It is too serious and somber to be widely regarded as satire, and has never fit comfortably into critics' views, though.

I must read Sinclair Lewis someday, for a variety of reasons, but if nothing else, I'll stop confusing him with Upton Sinclair.