Nobel Prize Award for Literature 1973 to 1977

About the Nobel Prize Award for Literature 1973 to 1977 including the authors such as Bellow and Montale, their works, and history.

LITERATURE

1973 Patrick White (1912- ), Australian

Work: The Tree of Man; Voss

1974 Eyvind Johnson (1900- ), Swedish

Work: The Novel about Olav

Harry E. Martinson (1904- ), Swedish

Work: The Road; The Days of His Grace

1975 Eugenio Montale (1896- ), Italian

Work: Cuttlefish Bones; The Storm and Other

Things; New Poems

1976 Saul Bellow (1915- ), American (b. Canada)

Work: Humboldt's Gift

Nobel Laureate: His father wanted him to be a doctor. His mother wanted him to be a Talmudist. But after Bellow--born in Lachine, Quebec, and brought up in Chicago--graduated from Northwestern University with honors in anthropology, he decided "in my innocence" to be a writer. He worked in a WPA writers' project, served in the U.S. Merchant Marine during W.W. II, went to Paris and Rome on a Guggenheim fellowship, taught at various universities, and emerged as one of America's most important postwar novelists. He won the National Book Award for fiction three times, for The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). Mr. Bellow's planet is essentially urban, Jewish, intellectual, middle class, and inhabited by emotionally complex and highly verbal heroes (or hero-victims). What of the future? "I am just a man in the position of waiting to see what the imagination is going to do next."

1977 Vicente Aleixandre (1898- ), Spanish

Work: Dialogues of Insight

Nobel Laureate: Aleixandre was born in Seville but reared in Malaga, which he regards as his spiritual home. Ailing from kidney tuberculosis since 1925, he had to forego law and business for the less aggravating life of a poet. He first gained attention in 1928, but his reputation as a surrealist poet didn't begin until 1954, when he published The Story of the Heart. He now lives, secluded and sickly, in a Madrid villa.

Nobel Lore: Aleixandre is the first Spaniard living in Spain to win the prize in 40 years. The academy's choice of this relatively unknown poet over such internationally acclaimed novelists as Doris Lessing, Graham Greene, and Gunter Grass caused a great stir in the literary world.