[cognito20]

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Your admiration for King is well placed but, perhaps, there is something beyond mere "entertainment" or quantity of output that makes him worthy of the Nobel.

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My rejoinder to that is, why does there -need- to be anything else? Why does an author who has provided -that much- quality entertainment, who has brought excitement and suspense and has almost certainly introduced the joy and love of reading to millions and millions of people worldwide, and whose entertainment is always of a high order, need to stand by and watch as the Nobel Prize is consistently (not always, but frequently) awarded to authors like Jelinek, whose own mother probably doesn't crack open one of her books unless it's a particularly rainy day in Vienna?

The fact that an author is popular does NOT necessarily imply that his work has less literary merit than some overly-arty hack who gets prizes thrown in his or her direction merely because five or six prominent Comp Lit department chairmen publicly fawn over his or her political agenda. King's popularity should -not- disqualify him from becoming a Nobel laureate....in fact, I would consider it a factor in FAVOR of giving him the honor.

People who think that King's popularity somehow degrades the quality of his work kind of remind me of a lot of the trust fund hippies I see here every day in Ithaca...people who think that just because something is "exotic", "diverse" or "multicultural", "underground" or not popular with the masses, that means it must be of superior quality. I was in the punk rock scene long enough when I was younger to have learned that that ain't necessarily the case.

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Churchill won it with, practically, one book.

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Not true. Although _The Second World War_ (a 6-book series, incidentally, although it can obviously be counted as one complete work) was cited as his magnum opus in the Nobel announcement, Sir Winston won the Nobel just as much for _The History of the English Speaking Peoples_ and _Life of Marlborough_ (OK, maybe the latter to a lesser extent) as for his war memoirs/history.

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Barbara Cartland's output was pure dross but well-written dross.

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Barbara Cartland on the best day of her life never wrote anything halfway as good or compelling as _Salem's Lot_, _It_, _The Green Mile_, _Night Shift_ (admittedly, the latter is a short story collection, but it's one of the best in that genre I've ever read), and we won't even bring _The Dark Tower_ series or _The Stand_ into the conversation. Is she an -example- of the general "class" of writer King is, or was for the first decade or so of his career? Sure, I suppose you could make a case for it. King, though, is the BEST of the class.

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I wonder if you had heard of Giorgos Seferis or of Michail Sholokhov before they won their Nobels. (One was absolutely worthy of it, IMO, and the other one not, by the way.)

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Seferis, I admit, no, I hadn't heard of him until I went to college, and even then I just knew -of- him, hadn't (and haven't to this day) read any of his works. Mikhail Aleksandrovich? You're barking up the wrong tree with that one. I mentioned that my minor in college was Comp Lit...my other minor was in Russian language and my major was in History, with a concentration in Russian and Soviet studies. (My father is of German ancestry and my mother Russian, hence my early and continued interest in both languages and cultures.) I not only have read Sholokhov and have known of him since I was about 13, but have read a number of his works, including _Tikhi Don_ (the Russian name for the 2-part _And Quiet Flows the Don_ and _The Don Flows Home to the Sea_), _Podnyataya Tselina_ (the 2-part _Harvest on the Don_ and _Virgin Soil Upturned_) and _Oni Srazhalis za Rodinu_ (_They Fought For Their Motherland_, his WW2 epic) in the original. I was never a huge fan of his since I was never into the whole Stalinist "Socialist Realism" thing, but I'm quite familiar with his work.

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"Obscure" you say? The Nobel Committee has given the award to Rudyard Kipling, for christ's sakes!

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In 1907. Things were a little different back then. And may I remind you that on each year either side of the Kipling award the Committee recognized such geniuses of longstanding importance as Giosue Carducci and Rudolf Eucken, authors whose timeless works are found in literary companions in alternate universes everywhere. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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And where is James Joyce?

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Six feet underground in a Zurich cemetery, IIRC. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] To paraphrase _The Five-Minute Iliad_ and apply it to the book of his that it deserves to be applied to, _Finnegan's Wake_ is one of the seminal works of literature....and as soon as someone translates it, we'll know for sure. _Ulysses_ is a great novel, though I don't know if I would've ranked it the #1 novel of the 20th century like the Modern Library did a few years back. I didn't get very much out of _Dubliners_, and although I enjoyed _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ I didn't like it nearly as much as _Ulysses_.

--Scott