ABSTRACT
In October 2008 American literature was catapulted into the international media limelight with the news that it was deemed to be unworthy of the prestige of the Nobel Prize by nobody lesser than the (now former) permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl. According to Engdahl, American writers were simply not up to Nobel standards: they were insular and ignorant, and they failed to participate in the big dialogues of literature. The response was fast, furious, and predictable: American literary critics and journalists hurled thunderous accusations at the Nobel committee. Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic at the Washington Post, denounced Engdahl as holding “an insular attitude towards a very diverse country”; David Remnick, another Pulitzer Prize author and editor for literature at the New Yorker, pointed out that that the Swedish Academy itself has been guilty of conspicuous ignorance over a very long period: “You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures.” Harold Augenbraum, Executive Director of the National Book Award organization, offered to send Engdahl a list, claiming that such comments made him think “that Mr. Engdahl has read little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age.”1
