Nobel Prize Award for Literature 1951 to 1956

About the Nobel Prize Award for Literature 1951 to 1956 including the authors such as Churchill and Jimenez, their works, and history.

LITERATURE

1951 Par F. Lagerkvist (1891-1974), Swedish

Work: Barabbas

1952 Francois Mauriac (1885-1970), French

Work: Therese

1953 Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British

Work: The Second World War

1954 Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), American

Work: The Old Man and the Sea; A Farewell to Arms

1955 Halldor K. Laxness (1902- ), Icelandic

Work: Independent People

Nobel Laureate: Born in Reykjavik, capital of Iceland, he grew up on a farm, among the working folk he wrote about--with a tough, ruthless realism that riled his conservative countrymen. An agnostic in his youth, he became a Catholic in 1924. While writing The Great Weaver from Kashmir, he convinced himself that religion and human happiness were incompatible. After three years in the U.S., he further convinced himself that man was "the gospel of the new culture" and that in socialism lay salvation. He traveled frequently and he traveled far, but he always came home to Iceland. In a sense, he never left home. He always wrote in Icelandic and about Icelanders. In 1928 he had written from San Francisco, "Nothing has taught me better to appreciate Iceland . . . than my stay in the million-peopled cities of the U.S. . . ." The disesteem was mutual, and he departed amid demands for his deportation. Since receiving the Nobel Prize at the early age of 53, he has become increasingly anti-ideology. His credo? "A story is still the best thing one can tell."

1956 Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958), Spanish

Work: Platero and I

Nobel Laureate: "Monotonous, full of moonlight and sadness" was how Jimenez characterized Jimenez's juvenile works. He was so embarrassed by Violet Souls and Waterlilies--printed, when he was 19, in violet and green inks, respectively--that he later destroyed every copy he could lay hands on. The older Jimenez graduated to "naked poetry," stripped of ornamentation. At 28 he was elected to the Spanish Royal Academy. "Ha! ha!" he scrawled on this invitation to sell out to the establishment. The academy couldn't take no for an answer, and over the years this election-rejection scene was replayed twice. In 1916 he visited the U.S., married Zenobia Camprubi Aymar, Rabindranath Tagore's Spanish translator, and wrote The Diary of a Newly Married Poet. He left Franco's Spain for Cuba, the U.S., and finally Puerto Rico. In a colorful cameo, he portrays himself as a bearded, black-garbed figure, riding on a donkey, while Gypsy children shout, "The madman! The madman!" Actually, he had a tenuous hold on sanity and was subject to deep depressions. He adored his wife of 40 years and said that she deserved his Nobel Prize.