The Question That Never Goes Away
An expected certainty during our Philip Roth Personal Library Book Club sessions is: “Why no Nobel Prize in Literature?” And on September 9, 2023, our presenter, the novelist and critic Steven Sampson, suggested possible reasons center on a certain anti-Americanism and a perception of Roth as a trashy, controversial writer.
“No male American writer born in America who doesn’t play the guitar (Bob Dylan won in 2016) has won the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1962,” Sampson said. It was John Steinbeck that year. Sampson made a note that Toni Morrison was a winner (1993).
Sampson cited anti-Americanism from remarks of a Nobel Prize committee chairman several years ago saying American writers were parochial and not open to other cultures and people in the world.
Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel in 1954 after publication two years earlier of The Old Man and the Sea. But that recognition did not come earlier after novels on love and sex, Sampson said, but about “one man pitted against nature, a fisherman, and a poor man at that.”
At the Philip Roth Society Conference which took place at the Newark Public Library in March of 2023, James Bloom, professor of English and American Studies at Muhlenberg College, offered a presentation on this very topic. U.S. citizens who received the Nobel include: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Brodsky, Toni Morrison, and Bob Dylan. Since 1901, a total of 110 prizes have been awarded and the recipients for 2023 will be announced in just a few days during the first week of October. The Nobel Prizes were established in Alfred Nobel’s will of 1895 and one portion was to be awarded to "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”
Roth was shortlisted a few times, but does it matter whether the prize eluded him? Roth received many other notable honors including the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, and the Man Booker International Prize.