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

Hauptmann (Die Ratten), Yeats (poems) , Shaw (Pygmalion) , Thomas Mann (Death in Venice) , O'Neill (Long Day's Journey Into Night), Hesse (Steppenwolf), Sartre (No Exit) and Fo (non si paga). Just 8. And as auntiehill I've read most o them while I was in college or still in school. Nevertheless I enjoyed reading them, especially Dario Fo, Gerhart Hauptmann and Sartre.
 
I just needed to post again to say that "Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson" is an awesome name.
 
The Nobel Prize for Literature is also notorious for being extremely political in a million different ways(anti-Russian, pro-communist, anti-American, too apathetic to realism, and having a not too surprising love for obscure Swedish authors). There are quite a few winners who have been forgotten by their own families, and some real giants that were snubbed.
 
Rudyard Kipling– read some of his poems, couple of short stories, and the Jungle Book when I was a kid.
W. B. Yeats – some of his poems.
George Bernard Shaw – Pygmalion (for school). Think I've read some other stuff but can't remember.
Thomas Mann – don't remember what. Maybe I started Steppenwolf but didn't finish it.
T. S. Eliot – some of his poems.
Sir Winston Churchill – The History of the English Speaking Peoples. There was an illustrated version of this that came out in the 1970s that I really enjoyed and sadly lost. He's not a bad writer.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – not One Hundred Years of Solitude, but Autumn of the Patriarch, which I didn't mind.
William Golding – Lord of the Flies (for school). I got the point, but reading a book for school can suck the joy right out of it. Well, joy's not the right word, but you know what I mean - drains any interest in what is a good book.

Also:
Hemingway: one of his Gulf novels, can't recall.
Patrick White: one of his, Tree of Life I think, also read his biography. Bit of an old bugger, in more ways than one, but an interesting guy.
Samuel Beckett - well, we've all seen Waiting for Godot.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - started Gulag Archipelago years ago, always meant to get back to it.
Seamus Heaney - some of his poetry.
Harold Pinter - watched The French Lieutenant's Woman and Sleuth, for which he wrote the screenplays.
Doris Lessing - read a novel set in Africa, iirc. Also tried to read her SF series, but wow, didn't get it at the time, when my normal fare was space opera. Maybe if I reread them now. But yeah, Nobel Prize winner wrote SF. Suck on that, norms! Kingsley Amis once had a little poem abut that:
"SF's no good," they bellow till we're deaf.
"But this looks good." "Well then, it's not sf."

Most of the more recent ones I've heard of but not read. Anyone read Saul Bellow? I keep getting told (in magazines and reviews) how good his is but have never met anyone who's read him. Same with Faulkner.
 
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Australis said:
Most of the more recent ones I've heard of but not red. Anyone read Saul Bellow? I keep getting told (in magazines and reviews) how good his is but have never met anyone who's read him.
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I read his last novel, Ravelstein; it's basically a character sketch, so there's not much plot, but it was decent. I don't know how representative it is of his major works.
 
Camelopard said:
Australis said:
Thomas Mann – don't remember what. Maybe I started Steppenwolf but didn't finish it.
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Hermann Hesse wrote Steppenwolf.
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Whoops! :lol: So maybe I haven't read Thomas Mann's Steppenwolf. :D Perhaps it was a doco I saw on Mann. But I did start Steppenwolf at some point (early 80s, I think).

Also reminded of that line that a classic novel is defined as one everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read. Or something.
 
Australis said:
Also reminded of that line that a classic novel is defined as one everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read. Or something.
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That's certainly true of classic histories.

When I saw that Theodor Mommsen had won the Nobel Prize, I thought to myself: "Hey, I should read his History of Rome."

Then I looked it up, saw that it was five volumes in length, and quietly filed that ambition under "maybe some other day."

But I am reading the abridged Penguin Classics version of Macaulay's History of England. Great book.

I honestly don't know how those 19th-century historians managed to write such enormous tomes by hand. I envy them.
 
Rageforthemachine said:
The Nobel Prize for Literature is also notorious for being extremely political in a million different ways(anti-Russian, pro-communist, anti-American, too apathetic to realism, and having a not too surprising love for obscure Swedish authors). There are quite a few winners who have been forgotten by their own families, and some real giants that were snubbed.
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Anti-American? In just over a hundred years, there have been ten American winners according to that list. Plus there've been ten U.K. winners. That seems a disproportionate amount of Anglophone writing!

Hm, six Swedish. Maybe a little excessive? Understandable, though.
 
1. Rudyard Kipling, Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, various poems
2. Theodor Mommsen, A History of Rome (well, a large portion of it ;))
3. William Butler Yeats, various poems
4. George Bernard Shaw, various plays
5. Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth
6. Hermann Hesse, Demian
7. TS Elliot, various poems
8. William Faulkner, Sanctuary
9. Winston Churchill, Frontiers and Wars
10. Ernest Hemingway, Nick Adam's Stories, A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, Death in the Afternoon, various short stories. Oddly, I only recently realized that I hate Hemingway and always have :lol:
11. Albert Camus, The Stranger
12. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath
13. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason
14. Saul Bellow, Ravelstein
15. William Golding, Lord of the Flies

I probably actually listened to 10-15% of the novels listed in audiobook form, but I can't remember which ones. Seems that I have some reading to do, I especially need to catch-up on non-English language writers.
 
1907 - Rudyard Kipling
1913 - Rabindranath Tagore
1923 - William Butler Yeats
1925 - George Bernard Shaw
1930 - Sinclair Lewis
1946 - Herman Hesse
1948 - T. S. Elliot
1949 - William Faulkner
1950 - Bertrand Russell
1953 - Winston Churchill
1954 - Ernest Hemingway
1962 - John Steinbeck
1983 - William Golding
1993 - Toni Morrison
 
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