Other / maxliu / 17 October 2008 / 4 Comments

Nobel Prize for Literature Judge Horace Engdahl's recent declaration that American writing is "parochial" appears to have confirmed what many of us have feared for a long time: that the current leading lights of U.S. literature might depart this earth without being honoured in the highest possible way.

America has produced 10 Nobel Prize winning writers since the award was established in 1901 - the first was Sinclair Lewis in 1930 and the most recent Toni Morrison in 1993. In between, William Faulkner made one of the most stirring acceptance speeches in Nobel history, telling the world, "I decline to accept the end of man," when he took the prize in 1949 and Ernest Hemingway was cited in 1954 for his, "mastery of the art of narrative and the influence he has exerted on contemporary style."

Just in case Stockholm is reading, here are five more Americans who deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Philip Roth

Arguably the world's greatest living novelist and twice winner of the National Book Award, Roth achieved widespread acclaim and notoriety with the publication of Portnoy's Complaint in 1969. Consistently blurring the boundaries between life and art, the counter-life and the actual, perplexing critics and rewarding readers, he has confounded the years with great wit and fierce intelligence to produce vital dramatisations of post-war American life well into his seventies. Roth would be a popular and obvious choice.

Watch a rare interview with Philip Roth.

Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy has produced Southern Gothics (Child of God), Westerns (All the Pretty Horses) and won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road - a devastating post-apocalyptic vision of America - in 2006. He writes with unflinching precision of the brutality of men scraping by in the backwoods of Tennessee or the vast blankness of the Southwest desert. Nobel laureate Saul Bellow praised his "life-giving and death-dealing sentences," and where McCarthy's landscapes are metaphors for the violence enacted upon them, death is a frequent intruder in the dust. He has said that his subject is matters of life and death and that he regards the idea that human beings can live in harmony as a dangerous one. Like William Faulkner, to whom he is seen as the heir, his work explores the nature of evil.

Read an extract from Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men here

JD Salinger

Not publishing a book since 1965 should not rule out the author of The Catcher in the Rye and the most influential American writer since Ernest Hemingway. Salinger, who turns 90 next year, explored themes of youthful dislocation and alienation in his first novel and while Catcher remains the last word in coming of age fiction, other works, such as Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories, have shaped the course of modern fiction too. Salinger regularly tops reader's polls for favourite books while John Updike, Philip Roth and Haruki Murakami have all spoken of the profound effect he had on helping them to find their voices.

Read JD Salinger's A Perfect Day for Bananafish here.

Joan Didion

The author of five novels and eight seminal works of non-fiction, Didion has been described by Martin Amis as "the poet of California" and by James Dickey as "the finest woman prose stylist writing in English today." Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her debut collection of essays and articles established Didion as a sharp chronicler of her times. She once said, "I don't know what I think until I write it down," and this is reflected in a cool, elegant style which penetrated the politics and culture of the second half of the American century to devastating effect. In 2005 she published The Year of Magical Thinking - a profound memoir of grief which was critically acclaimed and won her new readers around the world.

Listen to an interview with Joan Didion where she discusses The Year of Magical Thinking.

David Foster Wallace

The recent death of a 46-year-old novelist regularly described as the most gifted of his generation has left readers and writers across the globe shaken and numb. In his lifetime, lazy comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo often made it seem as though we somehow did not realise how good Wallace was or how lucky we were to have a writer of his magnitude working in the United States during our lifetimes. His novels, short fiction and journalism contain sustained passages of a genius which he brought to bear on a multitude of modern subjects, showing that there is such a thing as truth. Wallace said that when he was writing well he felt as though he was in dialogue with the world and although his dialogue never ends, it is too soon to reconcile oneself to the fact that there will be no more books from David Foster Wallace. The Nobel committee should make an exception and give him the award posthumously, next year.

Remember David Foster Wallace through his work here.