The New York Times's List of Great Writers Who've Been Snubbed by the Nobel Prize Is... All Men?
Christopher Frizzelle
What year is it again? What kind of people edit the New York Times again? What do you call it when the paper of record can only think of men who've been snubbed for the Nobel Prize in literature? And what do you call it when an article about the fact that there will be no Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 because of a sex-abuse scandal centered around the behavior of a straight guy...
https://www.thestranger.com/assets/sites/stranger/images/site-badge.svg
The Stranger
What year is it again? What kind of people edit the New York Times again? What do you call it when the paper of record can only think of men who've been snubbed for the Nobel Prize in literature?

And what do you call it when an article about the fact that there will be no Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 because of a sex-abuse scandal centered around the behavior of a straight guy (with close ties to the Swedish Academy) happens to omit any mention of women who've created great literature? Ironic? Patriarchal? Part of the problem? Erasure? One of those words. Maybe more than one.

From the story:

The academy was founded in 1786 as the arbiter of Swedish language and letters, and was designated by Nobel, in his will, to award the literature prize in his name. It began choosing winners in 1901, and for almost as long, some of its choices have been assailed as politicized, parochial or just misguided.

The list of prize winners has been heavy on authors, many of them Scandinavian, who are not well-remembered generations later, while the academy has passed over writers like Twain, Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce. In one notorious selection, it bestowed the 1974 prize on two of the academy’s own members, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, snubbing candidates like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene, none of whom ever got the nod.

You know who else didn't get the nod?

Willa Cather

Flannery O'Connor

Eudora Welty

Edith Wharton

Iris Murdoch

M.F.K. Fisher

Ursula K. LeGuin

Virginia Woolf

...and the list goes on! But the Academy doesn't award this prize posthumously anymore, so Virginia Woolf is never going to get it. And neither is James Baldwin. Goddamn it.

In other words, we need to focus on the living, and the fact that the only American literature winner in the last 25 years has been Bob Dylan, who doesn't even create literature and gets his ideas about literature from SparkNotes, is ridiculous and embarrassing.

But there's a glimmer of hope: The Times piece also reports that next year, two writers will simultaneously receive the Nobel Prize in literature.

Which gives the Academy a perfect opportunity to rectify two glaring oversights when it comes to American literature.

They should award next year's dual prize in literature to the two Americans who most deserve it: Joan Didion for what she did to reinvent the possibilities of nonfiction art, and Edmund White for capturing the gay American experience.

Bonus reason for the Academy to do this: You wouldn't be awarding it to yet another straight guy!