Kurt Vonnegut on why he never won the Noble Prize for Literature
inthesetimes.com/article/1726/
inthesetimes.comPosted Sep 20, 2011, 8:26 AM UTC
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inthesetimes.comI don't invest much at all in the Nobel Prize for Literature. They've made several notoriously bad decisions.
Also, though I love Vonnegut, I think there are other writers more deserving.
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We all realize this is tongue-in-cheek, right? I don't even think Vonnegut thought he deserved a Nobel Prize. I agree with the people who are saying he was good but not as good as most Nobel laureates (though there have been some head-scratch-inducing selections).
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I saw a video of Norman Mailer and Gunter Grass at the NYPL (Mailer accurately predicted it would be his last public event) and Mailer said that he never won the Nobel Prize because no matter how good he was they were never going to give it to a wife-stabber.
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so it goes
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I think he never won because award committees are notorious cliquish and short sighted.
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He never won because there are many more deserving writers.
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Hey buddy, we get it. You don't think Kurt Vonnegut is that great.
Stop trying to start a fight. This isn't 4chan.
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implying I'm your buddy
implying I was anything but mild-mannered
implying /lit/ doesn't have deeper discussions about literature than r/books ever does
implying I'm not allowed to disagree with people
implying your comment was relevant to this discussion
And I actually like Kurt Vonnegut a lot. But there were many more important writers in the 20th century and it's just silly to suggest that he was slighted because he didn't win a Nobel Prize.
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Pretending "buddy" isn't a colloquial term used ironically in this situation
Pretty much saying that you weren't being a patronizing fool by just saying you were mild mannered
implying that emotional or intellectual depth is not one of the most subjective of terms which makes it difficult to compare two things on the basis of it
implying that there isn't a difference between what you were doing and having a civil disagreement
implying that my comment was ever supposed to be relevant to main subject
And important is an interesting word to use. What I mean is, if you want to judge his importance, you must be speaking on his influence in English literature - in which case I would draw your attention to the fact that many many more writers in this day and age are influenced by him rather than some (note that I do not say "all") of those who were picked for the Nobel Prize instead of him.
And I think it is also silly to dismiss the critiques of the Nobel Prize for Literature when not so good selections are made so often.
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Because he wrote about "Wide Open Beavers".
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[deleted]
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My experience with the Nobel Prize (in any field) is that a lot of great people don't get them. There are just too many people who are deserving of the Prize but never actually win. Doesn't make them unless good at what they do.
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Because he wasn't that great of a writer?
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The reason Kurt Vonnegut never won the Nobel Prize for Literature is the fact that he's a genre writer and isn't considered 'literary' enough to qualify.
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Actually, people do consider Vonnegut a literary writer. He never won the prize because there are many more deserving writers.
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The only reason I read the article was because I was hoping Nobel was misspelled there too...
No, that mistake was all me.