SOURCE: Gunther, Ralph. “If a Traveler Comes to Florence—” In Giants in Their Field: An Introduction to the Nobel Prizes in Literature, pp. 1-25. Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1993.

[In the following excerpt, Gunther presents a biographical survey of some of the Nobel Prize in Literature winners, focusing on their diversity.]

If a traveler comes to Florence, to the graceful city in the hills of Tuscany where the poet Giosuè Carducci first went to school, he may simply stroll along a riverside street and wind up in a café, unaware of the artistic treasures around him. Or he may visit a priceless collection of paintings by Titian, Raphael, Tintoretto and Veronese, or go to the Galleria dell 'Accademia and gaze at the magnificent ‘david’ by Michelangelo—and suddenly fall under the spell of the birthplace of the Renaissance! Of course, a traveler may never reach Florence. In fact, hundreds of millions of people will never set foot in that city. They will never stand in the Piazza del Duomo, one early morning, to watch the rise of a new day over the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. They will never walk across the Ponte Vecchio, the covered bridge over the Arno River, in search of the famous Florentine museum, the Pitti Palace. They will never step into the Church of San Lorenzo to admire its sensuous carvings. Many millions of people will never even travel to Italy—or to France, or to Spain, or to Poland, or to any other country in the Old World with a rich history and with deeply embedded traditions. Thus they will miss the feeling, so perceptible in Florence, that up to the time of the Renaissance human beings were only part of a crowd, not the developers of a sense of their own individuality.

But they need not be the poorer for it.

They may, one day, come across an exceptional book about Italy. If fortunate, they will chance upon a novel by Grazia Deledda, or upon the lyrical poems by Salvatore Quasimodo, imbued with a deep Mediterranean sensitivity. In time, they may even come under the spell of books which will whisk them to other countries, perhaps the great stories by Mikhail Sholokhov about Russia, or by Pearl Buck about China; or the colorful tales by Rudyard Kipling about India. And when they stumble over a little boy and his donkey wandering through the countryside of Andalusia, in southern Spain, a walking tour narrated with infinite charm by the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, they will realize that one of the most creative ways of bringing the past into the present, of capturing the mood of an era, is reading. A skill in existence for over two thousand years, it allows the mind to explore the works of those who express themselves with beauty of thought and language. It also allows the mind to discover that people whose sightseeing is inward can in themselves find all they need for transport, and that such is a marvelous mode of journeying. Not just to learn that Florence was founded scant decades after the mass migration of Germanic tribes all over Europe in search of a new homeland, a trek that brought them up against Rome and the Consul Gaius Marius; or that twenty centuries later, a young author, Hermann Hesse, following his first visit to the city on the Arno, would suddenly become aware of his dislike for modern civilization. But to realize that there are other treasures in the world, treasures equal to those in the galleries of Florence and far more within reach of everyone: the works of the great masters of the pen!

Some of these works, written by men and women who achieved immense stature in the field of letters, may contain the true account of a person's life. In 1906, Winston Churchill brought out a two-volume biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, which became a landmark in British biographical literature. The biographies of Michelangelo and Gandhi, among others, sprung from the pen of Romain Rolland, throw a special light on the author's mind as a pacifist. Yasunari Kawabata kept a diary describing his grandfather's final days, and the effect of this on his own mind—a stunning first literary achievement for a sixteen-year-old. Ivan Bunin published a novelized autobiography, The Well of Days, a moving evocation of his youth in the land of the Czars, which became the key to his Nobel Prize in 1933. Pearl Buck, famous for her novel The Good Earth, wrote the biographies of her parents, the missionary pair in China, which became paramount in the Swedish Academy's decision to award her the Nobel Prize in 1938. André Gide's confessional literature, descriptions of the conflict between desire and restraint, led to illuminating meditations on life, and to the Nobel Prize in 1947. Eyvind Johnson wrote a four-volume masterpiece, The Novel About Olof, considered one of the finest examples of the Swedish semi-autobiographical genre; it brought him the Nobel Prize in 1974.

Other works may contain the account of particular streams of thought, or the account of real happenings in the life of a people. Romain Rolland wrote a powerful essay of pacifist protest, Above the Battle Field, which led to his Nobel Prize in the middle of the First World War; Rudolf Eucken, already a Nobel laureate, famous for his stand on the meaning and value of life, dedicated his latest philosophical work, The Representatives of German Idealism, to his two sons who were fighting in that war. Winston Churchill wrote a superb history of the Second World War, which gained him the Nobel Prize in 1953. By that time, Jean-Paul Sartre had published his most important work, Being and Nothingness, an impressive essay on Existentialism, the philosophical movement which stresses individual existence and holds that man is totally free and responsible for his acts—Albert Schweitzer, who had exercised that freedom and assumed responsibility for the needy in the jungles of Africa, accepted a Nobel Prize; his nephew, Jean-Paul Sartre, would decline one.

But most works in literature are fictional narratives. Combined with poetry and drama, they are the backbone of all writings of an imaginary character which possess permanent value. Selma Lagerlöf's classic, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, the story of a little boy who flies on gooseback over Sweden at a time when aviation was still experimental, captivated people all over the world, and led to her Nobel Prize in 1909. The Forsyte Saga, a trilogy by John Galsworthy, became so popular that it was continued in two further trilogies; it won him the Nobel Prize in 1932. The Thibaults, another sensational, multi-volume family chronicle by Roger Martin du Gard, was crowned with the Nobel Prize five years later—even before completion! Naguib Mahfouz finished his most celebrated work, the Cairo Trilogy, in the early 1950s; considered a sort of Egyptian Forsyte Saga, the first volume of this trilogy, Palace Walk, appeared in America, in English translation, only in the winter of 1990, when the two daughters of the author had already traveled to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in their father's name. Gabriel García Márquez had been thinking about One Hundred Years of Solitude for more than twenty years when, suddenly, the elusive plot took shape in his mind, the pieces of the story fell into place; he was driving through the mountains of México at the time, to Acapulco, and very likely had not the vaguest idea that he, too, would be invited to Stockholm as a result of it. Today the titles of novels like The Magic Mountain, The Silent Don, The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Doctor Zhivago and Lord of the Flies may be as familiar to readers as the names of theatre plays like The Blue Bird, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Desire Under the Elms, Murder in the Cathedral, Waiting for Godot and Kongi's Harvest, the latter wildly applauded at the first ‘Festival of Negro Arts’ held in Dakar, Sénégal—all created by authors who, together with a number of poets, received the Nobel Prize in Literature and attained international renown.

The history of the prizes reads like a compendium of fairy tales. The first German winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was born under Danish sovereignty and owed allegiance to King Frederick VI of Denmark. When the next Danish monarch, King Christian VIII, gave him a purse to travel to Italy and study Latin inscriptions, he unwittingly contributed to the creation of a masterpiece, the monumental History of Rome. The first British winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was born in India, far from the island from where Queen Victoria ruled her empire. He produced a body of work, on the Asian subcontinent and in North America—poems, stories, and two magnificent ‘Jungle Books’—which spread his fame through the English-speaking world even before he reached the age of thirty. The first Greek winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was born in Asia Minor, not far from the place where Cassandra, a king's daughter, had trembled at the sight of a wooden horse. He had to flee the threat of Turkish domination when only fourteen, but he carried with him the spirit of Homer, and later wrote a series of related poems, based on episodes and peoples from the Odyssey, which was hailed as a work of art along the coasts of the Mediterranean and beyond. The first Israeli winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was born in Galicia, a multi-ethnic province in eastern Europe, then part of the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He emigrated to Palestine, a land under Turkish domination, while still in his teens. When he reached Jaffa, he wrote a major tale which he signed for the first time with the pen name that would make him famous as one of the outstanding figures in modern Hebrew fiction. Thus Theodor Mommsen, Rudyard Kipling, George Seferis, and S. Y. Agnon came into prominence in the field of letters. Eventually, the birthplace of George Seferis fell to the Turks and was renamed Izmir, the name it had lost many decades earlier. But Palestine was wrested from the Turks by the British, who pledged to support a Jewish national homeland there; it became the State of Israel.

What is the Nobel Prize?

It is the prize of all prizes! Conceived to honor the great minds of the world, it comes from a peninsula washed by chilly seas—a peninsula which Eyvind Johnson, not yet ready for The Novel About Olof, would leave as a stowaway on a ship, and which Bertrand Russell, well-known for The Principles of Mathematics, would have to swim to if he wanted to live. Awarded on the eve of winters, the prize consists of a gold medal, a diploma bearing a citation, and a sum of money. Its first appearance goes back to the year 1901, the year in which Rudyard Kipling published Kim. And like Kim, the magnificent story of a boy who grows up in India, the prize has no equal.

To determine the origin of that prize, one has to turn to northern Europe in the nineteenth century. One man, Alfred Bernhard Nobel, was responsible for its inception. Born in Stockholm, on October 21, 1833—when Theodor Mommsen was already close to sixteen—he spent the first years of his life in Sweden. When he was four, his father moved to Finland, then to Russia. Five years later, the boy and the rest of the family joined him in St. Petersburg; there he would be tutored privately, become proficient in languages, and acquire a suitable education. When he was seventeen, he began to travel and to sojourn in other countries. From his father he inherited a talent for invention, on his own he developed an affinity for literature. In time, his attention turned to chemistry: he invented dynamite and blasting gelatine! Then he produced explosives and detonators and, before long, became a successful industrialist and immensely wealthy. There were several accidental explosions, one of which caused the death of his brother Emil, aged twenty-one. Inevitably, the military use of his inventions came about. He had always thought that his explosives, by their very destructiveness, would help prevent wars, and he began to view mankind with pessimism. He came to admire Herbert Spencer, the British writer on education who adopted the Darwinian theory and built a philosophy based on evolution as the ultimate principle in the universe. He never married. When he died on the Italian Riviera, in 1896, he had made the provision for an extraordinary prize, a prize to be given annually to those who during the preceding year had conferred ‘the greatest benefit on mankind’. Later called the Nobel Prize, he asked that it be divided into five equal parts: one for the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency in the field of literature, one for the most important discovery in physiology or medicine, one for the most important discovery or invention in the field of physics, one for the most important chemical discovery or improvement, and one for the best work of fraternity among nations, including the abolition or reduction of armies and the holding and promoting of peace congresses. In a will written in his own hand, he requested that his capital be invested in safe securities, and that it constitute a fund, the interest of which should be distributed annually in the form of prizes in these fields. It would take several years to work out the stipulations of that will. He expressly wished that the nationality of the candidates be disregarded, so that the most worthy, whether Scandinavian or not, would be able to receive the prize.

The first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was the French poet René-François-Armand Prudhomme, better known as Sully-Prudhomme. A dictionary of world authors, published in France in 1984, closes a brief entry on him with the astonishing remark: “Who remembers that he was, in 1901, the first Nobel Prize in Literature?” Covering a period of more than nine decades, that prize has since been awarded more than 80 times, spanning nationalities from more than 30 countries and original works written in more than 20 languages. The most coveted of prizes, summarized by a former President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as ‘the highest recognition of intellect that can be bestowed on a man or woman’, its recipients—novelists, poets, playwrights, philosophers and historians—are often spoken of as members of the most exclusive ‘Club’ in the world. A lot of people may not remember Sully-Prudhomme today. Perhaps none but a handful of scholars and the odd dilettante know that he turned to prose-writing only at the end of his life; but to many he is still the shy poet who wrote “Le vase brisé,” a beautiful poem about a broken vase, and the young man who made a remarkable translation of Lucretius into French verse. The announcements of the winners of the Nobel Prize are made in Stockholm, in the fall, and are the culmination of intense expectations worldwide. The prize in literature, as well as the prizes in physiology or medicine, in physics, in chemistry and, more recently, in the economic sciences, is presented by the King of Sweden in the Concert Hall in Stockholm. The peace prize, the only Nobel Prize given in Oslo, is presented by the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in the Assembly Hall of the University of Oslo, in the presence of the King of Norway and the royal family. These ceremonies, which take place every year on December 10, are glittering social events in both cities.

The early years of the Nobel laureates contain their own measure of importance. Some were born into great wealth, others saw the light of day in great poverty. Some earned degrees as a matter of course, others followed the paths of education by the sweat of their brows. W. B. Yeats received his first formal instruction when many of his peers were already school-wise; his father first gave him lessons at home. Some disliked their schools with a passion: Maurice Maeterlinck spoke of his stay at the Collège de Sainte-Barbe as ‘seven years of tyranny’, and Gerhart Hauptmann described his years at the Realschule in Breslau as ‘a time of everlasting toothache’; at Cheltenham College in England, Patrick White spent ‘four detestable years of his life’; in the Balkans, Ivo Andrić called his high school ‘a wasteland’—Some had schooling that was scant beyond belief, but they managed to draw on personal reserves of willpower and determination and, in time, to become self-educated and vastly knowledgeable. A sizable number would publish their works under names different from those received at birth. José Echegaray, the first author from the Iberian Peninsula to become a Nobel laureate, began his writing career with books about geometry and thermodynamics, hardly the subjects from which literature is made; an engineer by profession, he later wrote his first neo-Romantic plays under the pseudonym jorge hayaseca, and became one of the most popular playwrights in the history of the Spanish Theatre. Karl Gjellerup, one of two authors from the Danish island of Sjaelland to win a Nobel Prize, published his first novel under the pseudonym epigonos—and studied watercolor in Rome, stepping into the footprints of a poet from Sweden, Verner von Heidenstam, who had studied watercolor there before him. Hermann Hesse's Demian, which became a household word with every generation following ‘the war to end all wars’, saw its maiden print under the pseudonym emil sinclair; although the Boston Transcript called it ‘a nightmare of abnormality, the crazed dream of a paranoiac’, its place in the line of great German novels could never be shaken. A few authors adopted the names of the land they lived on as children: hamsun, karlfeldt, sillanpää, laxness are actually place names, the names of farms and homesteads; they originated the pen names Knut Hamsun, Erik Karlfeldt, Frans Sillanpää and Halldór Laxness, symbols of excellence in world literature. One name change was an accident: the misspelling of Stanislas Rejment's name on a Russian document, when he was sixteen, led to Wladyslaw Reymont, the name that would make him famous as the author of The Peasants, one of the finest tetralogies to come out of Poland. When a spokesman for the Swedish Academy announced Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto as the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, the audience sat mystified, thinking that an obscure person had been chosen for the prestigious prize. Then the speaker, having made a pause, added with a smile: “—better known as Pablo Neruda”, and everybody burst into applause upon hearing the familiar name. A pseudonym, the name had first been used in a poetry contest in the south of Chile, when the aspiring poet was fifteen. Fifty-two years later, by then renowned, the poet's residence was the Chilean Embassy in Paris, and his poems were read on every continent. Another Latin American, Miguel Angel Asturias, whose residence was the Guatemalan Embassy in Paris, had won the Nobel Prize four years earlier; the Swedish Academy had announced his laureateship on his birthday. The two ambassadors were friends, and had written a book together; they had also known conflict with political leaders, and had tasted exile.

The status of belonging to a country held significance for a number of Nobel laureates: loss of citizenship, the acquisition of a new one, the regaining of an old one were their lot. The first Russian exile, Ivan Bunin, who spent the final decades of his life in France, is sometimes referred to as French, though no proof of his having asked for that nationality is apparent. Saint-John Perse, born on an island in the Caribbean, and Claude Simon, born on an island in the Indian Ocean, were French citizens; so was Albert Camus, born on the African rim of the Mediterranean. Patrick White, a fourth-generation Australian, was born in London. Henri Bergson, who was born in Paris, was a British citizen; he applied for French citizenship only when he completed his ‘baccalauréat’ at the Lycée Condorcet, the school where some time later Jean-Paul Sartre would teach. Thomas Mann, who in the 1930s became a Czech citizen and in the 1940s an American citizen, is universally known as a German writer; he spent his last years in Zürich, the city where Theodor Mommsen had started the History of Rome. Elias Canetti and T. S. Eliot became British citizens: the former, born on the eastern Balkan Peninsula by the Black Sea, is widely considered a Bulgarian; the latter, born in America, is only spoken of as a Briton. In the 1970s, within a time span of twenty-one months, two authors were thrown out of Russia, Joseph Brodsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one on his way to a Nobel laureateship, the other already there. Stateless, they came to America, to the country whose next four winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature were in for a rare common denominator: they would be foreign-born, and their mother tongues would not be English!

Progress, with its relentless element of change, has left deep traces in the twentieth century. Its effect on human creativity, and on the development of nations, may never be fully measured by present-day generations. Provençal, the language in which the first cultivated vernacular lyric poetry of Europe had been written, reached the edge of extinction. The use of the telephone did away with much of spontaneous letter writing. The advent of television brought a new, passive quality to the life styles of many people, and reshaped the reading habits of the young. Jet travel made the crossing of continents as easy as taking a bus to a destination a few miles down the road—albeit not with the same spirit of adventure which little Nils Holgersson had experienced from the back of a goose. When Gabriela Mistral, a girl not yet in her teens, stood for the first time in front of the Pacific Ocean, in total awe, the Chilean skies were not yet rent by airplane engines. Did she sense that she would never follow the sun across that ocean? Was her young mind already playing with the sound of words, with rhythmic sequences? She could hardly have known that her future was tied to children, and that this would one day anger the followers of Generalissimo Franco in war-torn Spain; or that a young artist from Romania would one day proudly illustrate a book of hers. What did Harry Martinson think, a boy just in his teens, when he stood by the Kattegat and caught his first view of the schooner ‘Willy’, the ship that would take him away as a cabin boy? Did the forerunners of poetry course through his mind, or the years of intercontinental vagabondage which beckoned on the horizon? Was he already the holder of beliefs that would make him run to the defense of a small country which had suddenly come under attack from a powerful neighbor? He could hardly have known that he would one day be invited, like the South American girl who had gazed at her own ocean, to stand before the King of Sweden and receive a Nobel Gold Medal. What did the German Consul in Geneva think when he learned that Romain Rolland refused the Goethe Medal, a great honor from the city of Frankfurt? In a letter addressed to him, in the spring of 1933, the French pacifist and Nobel laureate wrote that he could not accept an honor from a government which allowed the crushing of rights and the proscription of the Jews. Shortly thereafter, Hitler issued a decree forbidding German citizens in future to accept a Nobel Prize. It is not difficult to imagine what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn thought, in the spring of 1978, when the American press reacted to his Harvard Commencement address by defending the ‘decadent’ qualities of the West as the price for freedom; the social erosion that had begun in the cities in freedom-loving America had not merited a newspaper outcry yet. But it will forever be a matter of speculation what Ernest Hemingway, a correspondent in several wars, would have thought of women in the 1980s fighting for admission in an all-male military academy at West Point.

When Alfred Bernhard Nobel affixed his signature to his will in Paris, in 1895—three quarters of a century before Pablo Neruda arrived in that city as the Ambassador of Chile—dynamite had been used to blast open the oil fields of Baku. Dynamite had also been used to blast a tunnel through the Alps, to blast a canal across a stretch of Greece, and to blast people into oblivion in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, the war from which a young Pole, the brother of Henryk Sienkiewicz, never returned. The Swedish inventor, to whom war was ‘the horror of horrors’, was to think in vain about the invention of a device with such powers of destruction that wars could be stopped forever. Five years after it was written, and following innumerable discussions, painstaking research, and thorough planning, the feasibility of implementing that will was accepted by the prize-awarding bodies. Early in the summer of 1900, King Oscar II of Sweden announced the creation of the Nobel Foundation, a nongovernment organization, which would be responsible for administering the considerable funds of the Swedish inventor's fortune, and of safeguarding the financial basis of the prizes. The task of selecting the winners would involve the most careful scrutiny by the members of two academies and of one nobel assembly in Sweden, and by the members of one nobel committee in Norway. The first prizes were awarded the following year, in 1901, on December 10, the fifth anniversary of Alfred Bernhard Nobel's death. In time, as if in response to a guest from another era, two atom bombs exploded in a populated archipelago in the Pacific, and people suddenly began to wonder about the unbroken succession of civilization.

The twentieth century is often called the ‘Century of Violence’. As the last of its ten decades begins its journey through time, it is unlikely that many Nobel laureates—or for that matter the millions of people who use a pen every day and do not receive a prize for their labors—will find fault with that denomination. Two of the Nobel Prize winners in Literature ended their lives by their own hand, one in the Far East, the other in the American Far West; a third was killed in an automobile accident in France. In 1918, while the First World War was still raging, Anatole France predicted that it carried the seeds of three or four equally horrible wars. Sir Rabindranath Tagore surrendered his knighthood the following year, in protest against the shooting of four hundred unarmed demonstrators at Amritsar, in northern India. Arson destroyed the home of S. Y. Agnon in Europe; years later, rioters would ravage his home in the Middle East. In China, Pearl Buck narrowly escaped death when Communist forces took Nanking and began to hunt down foreigners. Ernest Hemingway was severely wounded in one world war, Heinrich Böll in another; in between, Camilo José Cela was wounded in the Spanish Civil War, the war which saw the Madrid home of Vicente Aleixandre bombed out before the city surrendered. In Paris, in a peaceful street, a bored panhandler pushed a knife into Samuel Beckett's chest, only just missing the heart; in the same city, the apartment of Jean-Paul Sartre would be blown up by right-wing terrorists. During the Second World War, when men of letters became involved in the Résistance, Czeslaw Milosz, who lived in Warsaw, wrote under the name jan syruć, Albert Camus, who lived in Paris, under the names albert mathe and bauchart; in spite of precautions, the latter barely escaped being caught by the Gestapo at least once. Nazi hoodlums roughed up Pablo Neruda in Cuernavaca, México. In Florence, the Fascists kept Eugenio Montale under surveillance; in Bergamo, the birthplace of Donizetti, Salvatore Quasimodo landed in prison. Further north, the relatives of Nelly Sachs were quietly murdered; while she was being saved from certain death by a Nobel laureate whom she would never meet, Sigrid Undset had to hide from machine-gunning planes in the snow fields of Norway: both women reached Sweden—and sanctuary—after many hardships, in the ninth month of the war, neither aware of the plight of the other. George Seferis, one of the first intellectuals to openly criticize the dictatorship of the ‘Colonels’ in Greece, became the victim of official harassment and vilification in the last years of his life. In her country on the southern tip of Africa, Nadine Gordimer was labeled a very disloyal citizen for her writings on the theme of ‘apartheid’. At the time of the Olympics in México, the willful shooting of Mexican student demonstrators, sanctioned by the government, caused Octavio Paz to register strong protests and to resign from his post as Ambassador of México to India. In his homeland on the south coast of West Africa, Wole Soyinka received death threats for defending the right of an author to have his work published. Violence and irreverence for life were no less evident in the previous century: Henrik Pontoppidan, wide-eyed, had watched foreign armies march into his native Jutland when only six; Winston Churchill, freshly out of Sandhurst, with battle cries from India and Africa still to ring in his ears, had first been shot at on a sparkling island in the Caribbean.

Yet, the stand taken by the Nobel Prize winners in Literature in the face of violations of rights, in the twentieth century and earlier, can only be called an endorsement of peace. As the clouds of war sailed over Europe, Carl Spitteler, whose element was the mythical epic, wrote a politically influential tract on neutrality. Henryk Sienkiewicz, in Switzerland for the purpose of organizing help for the Polish towns and villages that were being destroyed in the First World War, made a famous appeal to the civilized world on behalf of his country. Thomas Mann gave a courageous speech in Berlin, asking the German people to resist the power build-up of the Nazis; before long, he was an exile. André Gide brought about legal reforms which led to the curbing of industrial concessions in the colonies; in a public debate in 1935, he emphasized the essential relationship of his literary campaigns with oppressed peoples or races, or with human instincts. In the same year, François Mauriac condemned Mussolini's assault on Ethiopia. Pär Lagerkvist wrote a play decrying Fascism. Romain Rolland worked unceasingly for the improvement of relations between nations: his home in Switzerland was visited by world leaders. Jaroslav Seifert wrote poems about Prague which became an inspiration to every Czech patriot during the German occupation of central Europe. Nelly Sachs, a refugee in Sweden, wrote the awe-inspiring poetry which called attention to the soul of her people, a people almost annihilated in the Second World War. In America, in the 1960s, Saul Bellow served on an ad hoc committee aimed at ending the war in Vietnam. Prose works by Heinrich Böll became devastating attacks on the futility of war. Pablo Neruda traveled to Peking in the name of the World Peace Council to hand the international peace prize to Mme Sun Yat-sen, the wife of the first President of China. Pearl Buck, who had grown up in China, established a foundation to assist fatherless, and often stateless, half-American children throughout Asia. Gabriela Mistral made the first global appeal for funds for the poor children of the world, and helped in the creation of the United Nations Children's Fund, or unicef. Gabriel García Márquez served on a tribunal which investigated the abuse of human rights in Latin America; he founded a human rights organization called ‘habeas’, in México. Naguib Mahfouz openly approved the 1979 Treaty between Egypt and Israel, unmindful that several Arab countries would henceforth prohibit the sales of his books. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn assigned proceeds from the sales of The Gulag Archipelago to help families of imprisoned dissidents in the Soviet Union. Bertrand Russell, just months away from his ninetieth birthday, was handed a jail sentence and served time in prison for participating in a ‘ban-the-bomb’ demonstration in London—the same year in which Jean-Paul Sartre's apartment was blown up in Paris!

When Egypt and Israel agreed to end the state of war which had existed between them for nearly thirty years, the leaders of both countries became the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. At present, the Nobel Prize is given in six fields. For each field there is a Nobel Committee, totalling five Swedish committees and one Norwegian committee. The Swedish Academy appoints the committee for literature. The Karolinska Institute of Stockholm appoints the committee for physiology or medicine. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences appoints three committees, one each for physics, chemistry and economics; the latter was added in 1968, when the Bank of Sweden instituted a prize in the economic sciences, a prize first awarded in 1969. The Norwegian Parliament, or ‘Storting’, appoints the committee for peace. The regulations governing that committee date from 1905, the year in which the political union between Sweden and Norway came to an amicable end. Each Nobel Committee is made up of five members, and is free to avail itself of advice from experts and specialists anywhere in the world.

A number of creations of the Nobel laureates were set to music, others were immortalized on the screen. Films based on such creations have won many prizes at national and international film festivals. The talking picture in which Greta Garbo's voice was first heard was Anna Christie, the screen version of the play for which Eugene O'Neill had received a Pulitzer Prize. Several poems by Odysseus Elytis found expression in the catching melodies of Míkis Theodhorákis of Greece. Works by Frédéric Mistral, Maurice Maeterlinck and Gerhart Hauptmann, to mention but a few, led to the operas Mireille, Pelléas and Mélisande and The Sunken Bell, cherished by opera lovers around the world. Musicians sometimes intervened directly in the lives of distinguished authors: when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was hounded by his Russian detractors, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich gave him shelter in his ‘dacha’ near Moscow. Bernard Shaw and T. S. Eliot sparked musicals which were acclaimed by millions! In February 1941, Maurice Maeterlinck, a refugee from the war in Europe, became the guest of the city of Philadelphia, and for the first time attended a performance of Pelléas and Mélisande, the opera he had persistently refused to see for almost forty years. The first Italian sound film, Song of Love, was based on a story by Luigi Pirandello. However, adaptations of the literary productions of the Nobel Prize winners were not limited to films or music. A novel by Selma Lagerlöf was adapted for the stage by Gerhart Hauptmann, and received a memorable première in Berlin under the direction of Max Reinhardt. William Faulkner's novel Requiem for a Nun was rewritten for the stage by Albert Camus, and premièred in Paris in September 1956; in the same month, an editorial board in Moscow, unwilling to recognize a masterpiece, rejected Boris Pasternak's manuscript of Doctor Zhivago, the work which would then be smuggled to Italy. Hermann Hesse's novel Narcissus and Goldmund, an adventure for the senses and the spirit, was made suitable for dance and became the narrative ballet Equinox; commissioned for the Pennsylvania Ballet, its world première took place in Philadelphia—just steps away from where Maurice Maeterlinck had watched a play of his unfold as an opera.

Some of the creations of the Nobel Prize winners in Literature produced effects of a different kind: they failed to find favor with people who, occasionally, were in position to decide their fate. Thus several of their writings were placed on the Vatican ‘index’ of Forbidden Literature; the act of reading a book listed there, or part of it, excluded a Roman Catholic from his Church with absolute finality. In 1909, a Joint Select Committee on Stage Censorship declared all the plays by Bernard Shaw to be ‘conscientiously immoral’. In 1940, a Supreme Court judge annulled Bertrand Russell's teaching contract with the City College of New York, on the grounds that he was ‘an advocate of immorality’; one of his books, Marriage and Morals, published earlier, favored ‘temporary marriages’ for college students—a concept too advanced, at the time, for parents of students in America, and elsewhere, who did not yet consider coed dormitories essential to higher education. Officials at Harvard were quick to announce that the Supreme Court decision would have no effect at Harvard, where the British philosopher was scheduled to give the ‘William James Lectures’ in the fall. In 1980, a school board in the State of Iowa banned The Grapes of Wrath from use in sophomore English classes, the remarkable work by John Steinbeck which a reviewer for the London Times had termed ‘one of the most arresting novels of its time’. A landmark in American culture, the work had won a Pulitzer Prize, had received two Oscars for its 1940 film version, and had led to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. That it would become a famous stage production, in England and in America—and win a Tony Award in 1990—could in all likelihood not have been foreseen by any school board. In the Germany of Adolf Hitler, huge bonfires settled the matter of disapproved books: the works of Upton Sinclair, Halldór Laxness, Lion Feuchtwanger, Sigrid Undset, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Jakob Wassermann, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, and countless other writers, perished in flames. In 1986, during the spring of the southern hemisphere, more than 14,000 copies of the novel Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín were burned by the military authorities in the harbor of Valparaíso; at about the same time, its author, Gabriel García Márquez, was attending the political talks being held in Cuba in support of the Contadora Peace Process for Central America. Countries in which the works of the Nobel laureates, or of the Nobel laureates-to-be, were officially banned or censored, at one time or another, include Ireland, South Africa, Spain, Germany, the United States, Italy, Great Britain, Egypt, France, Chile, Russia, Guatemala and Nigeria. Joseph Brodsky, who had been jailed for his poetry while in his twenties, and whom the Swedish Academy announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1987, may have expressed the thoughts of all book lovers when, in December of that year, he said: “There would be less grief in the world if leaders were chosen on basis of what they read rather than their political programs; as a form of moral insurance, literature is more dependable than system of beliefs or philosophical doctrine.” Did he have an intuition of what the future held for the imprisoned playwright Václav Havel of Czechoslovakia? Or of the commitment which the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was ready to make for Perú?

The nominations of candidates for the Nobel Prize are made by invitation only. The invitations are sent out in the last months of the year preceding the award. Every year a number of prominent people are invited to send in their nominations; those contacted, in countries throughout the world, include intellectuals, scholars, professors, members of academies, previous Nobel laureates, and individuals, or groups of people, foremost involved in peace activities. The invitations to submit proposals are strictly confidential, as are the names of the candidates proposed. The deadline for the proposals is february 1 of the year in which the prizes are to be given. On that day, the real toil of the Nobel Committees begins: the careful examination of each candidate's work, the collecting of information, the sifting of data, the writing of reports. By the time these tasks have been completed, usually in the summer or the early fall, several thousand people—among nominators, committee members, specialists, and consultants—will have participated in, or contributed to, the confidential evaluating process of the nominees. Then the reports and recommendations are sent to the prize-awarding bodies which have the right to make final decisions: the swedish academy (with 18 members), the royal swedish academy of sciences (with some 75 members), the nobel assembly of the Karolinska Institute (with 50 members), and the norwegian nobel committee (with 5 members), actually the committee elected by the ‘Storting’, the only Nobel Committee with the right to decide a prize by itself. …

[The] profiles of the Nobel laureates contain descriptions favoring the early years of their lives. Like brush strokes on a canvas, applied sparingly, they seek to capture the likeness of people whose presence in the world of letters goes far beyond the ordinary. Only two of the Nobel Prize winners in Literature were historians, fewer than half a dozen were philosophers. The majority were men and women whose literary productions place them firmly in the ranks of novelists, poets, and dramatists. The narratives of many of their works run the gamut from exciting to spellbinding. Jacinto Benavente's peasant tragedy, The Passion Flower, on its first visit across the North Atlantic, totalled more than 850 performances in America alone! Some 80٪ of the works of the Nobel laureates were written in languages other than English. Translations into English, or into languages other than the original, follow no pattern that is discernible. The English version of L'Arrabbiata, the work which established Paul Heyse as the creator of the modern psychological novella, appeared more than ten years after it was first published in Germany; on the other hand, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, a piece of Bernard Shaw's expository prose, was translated into Yiddish by Hinde Esther Singer, the sister of Isaac Bashevis Singer, less than one year after its original publication in England. It is perhaps symbolic that in the feud between Islam and Christianity the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz, written in Arabic, was first translated into Hebrew, the language of Israel, and that both languages arise from a common source. Each biography is accompanied by a list of the author's more popular creations, and includes date of first publication and genre. Accuracy has been pursued to a fine point. Complete accuracy remains a matter of debate: errors of dating are repeated from one reference book to another, and mistakes will slip into even the most reputable of encyclopaedias. Rudyard Kipling's age on being awarded the Nobel Prize is frequently given as 42, when in reality it was 41. Joseph Brodsky is widely cited as the second youngest Nobel Prize in Literature, but his actual standing is sixth in line to that claim. And it seems to be accepted that the Nobel Prize to Romain Rolland was awarded in 1915, to Carl Spitteler in 1919, to Bernard Shaw in 1925, to Grazia Deledda in 1926, to Henri Bergson in 1927, and to William Faulkner in 1949—when neither author received the prize in those years!

The lives of the Nobel laureates are filled with a vibrancy that has shaped their course for more than one hundred seventy years. Theodor Mommsen, who was born in 1817, had a long and happy marriage to Marie Reimer and produced sixteen children; he won the Nobel Prize in 1902. Bjornstjerne Bjornson, who was born in 1832, had a celebrated career as an orator and was often referred to as ‘the uncrowned king of Norway’; he won the Nobel Prize in 1903. However, the Nobel Prize in Literature was not awarded every year. On occasion, when there were not enough votes for a winner, the prize was put on reserve. In 1914, the dramatic change in the world situation made the Swedish Academy decide, for the first time, to omit the distribution of the prize entirely, a decision it would make six more times in the next twenty-nine years. During some of the war years, when the Nobel Prize was in fact given, no official ceremonies were held, either in Stockholm or in Oslo. Only one author made it to Sweden in those years, Frans Sillanpää of Finland. As the Second World War had already broken out, he avoided the danger of a sea trip across the Baltic. Instead, he took the long and hazardous route overland, around the Gulf of Bothnia; a journey which at intervals required his trekking through ice and snow, first along the Finnish coast, then along the coast of Sweden. When he finally reached Stockholm, the Swedish Academy honored him with a private dinner, at which time he was handed his prize. Less than five years later, William Golding sailed his rocket-launching craft to the coast of France for the D-Day invasion of Europe.

Alphabetic writing came into use for literary purposes in the middle of the seventh century b.c. Literary creations have influenced religious and secular affairs ever since. Today the written word is mankind's greatest legacy, and the Nobel Prize winners in Literature occupy an eminent place therein. In a world in which statements of faith in human values are being put to the test with bewildering frequency, Johannes Jensen's novel The Long Journey acquires new meaning: it is a magnificent, six-volume tale of the Darwinian theory, in which poetry, symbolism, and myth combine to produce a work of epic dimensions. T. S. Eliot thought that no art could be more stubbornly national than poetry, but myth, the indispensable element of timelessness, is equally part of the heritage of nations. The books written by the Nobel Prize winners in Literature are not always displayed prominently in bookstores or libraries, or even in schools, but many of them hold the key to a world of incredible adventure, a world which Isaac Bashevis Singer—who wrote in Yiddish, a language not supported by any government—was sure was only once removed from the true world.

A breathtaking world, action-packed, abundant in symbols, leading triumphantly to the power of one's own imagination.

A wondrous world, filled with distinct voices, created by weavers of tales whose molds were broken when they made them.

A stirring world, in which the works of the great masters of the pen, of late also Derek Walcott's, are guiding signals to modern consciousness—perhaps for as long as the green hills of Tuscany stand guard over the birthplace of the Renaissance.

Untouched by time, in Jerusalem, a sign in the street where an immigrant from Galicia once lived reads:

‘quiet, agnon is writing!’