Please tell Mr. Ehle that his place among the greats is deserved and that his mention among those other writers honors them as much as it honors him.

Glad he was pleased – and looking forward to the new editions of his classic works….

I forgot that there were no American writers before the invention of movies. No Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville. No Walt Whitman. No Emily Dickinson. No Edgar Allen Poe. No Transcendentalists.

Oh wait, you mean there was literature before the advent of movies and your Palin reference was just a cheap political shot that was somehow supposed to bolster your point? Oh Tony, I can hear your cries though, of how their literature just isn’t good enough, and I suppose you’re right. How could it ever hope to compare to all the fantastic literature in 19th century Europe (and it really was great). Wait, what’s that? Moby Dick is still considered one of the greatest novels ever written? And Poe is still endlessly cribbed from?

Idiot.

You might be interested in this tidbit from Pulitzer history: the prize winner for 1929 was LAUGHING BOY by Oliver LaFarge. I’ve read it – nice little book.

Also nominated but passed over that year for the LaFarge opus – THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner, A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway, and LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL by Thomas Wolfe.

Says everything one could ever need to know about the Pulitzer selection process’s flaws….

JS, I suggest you go look at a list of the Nobel literature winners. Yes, there are some undeniably great ones – but there are any number of choices that’ll have you scratching your head….

There’s been some excellent sci-fi that approaches “great” literature of Nobel quality. Ursula LeGuinn wrote “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Word for World is Forest.” Certainly, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” George Orwell’s “1984,” and HG Wells’ “The Time Machine” are excellent works. I would even say that Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” has much to recommend it. I love science fiction, but I don’t think there’s been a sci-fi author yet who matches up with Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, and the like.

But, it’s subjective, I readily admit.

I can see why fantasy/scifi and other speculative fiction isn’t usually considered literature. The popular idea is, going off Angliss’ definition again, the focus is usually on setpieces (like magic or technology) and not on the characters. This isn’t true of all speculative fiction though, but it’s a stigma of the whole genre.

But the comment I wanyed to make has to do with how the US sopposedly doesn’t translate enough. How one can possibly gauge that is beyond me, but it shouldn’t matter whether or not a country translates books (especially since the state is not a publisher) but whether the books are obtainable in said country. For example there are very few arabic novels translated within the borders of the U.S. However, you can still access a large number within the US, even if they are translated in Egypt by the AUC Press or Lebanon by various publishers.

Also, as for insular – does that mean old Soviet-bloc authors did not write books capable of obtaining a Nobel? Hell, even before. Is Dostoyevsky – more than just a tad insular – worse for it? Had he been published, would Bulgakov been removed from the lists because he did not have access to all of world literature and therefore could not engage in the correct dialogue?

But I guess I shouldn’t even know of these authors or publishers since I am an American and therefore must be ignorant.

Also – in regards to brooklyngal – have fun attempting to instill hierarchies into the arts. We will ignore them.

Leonard may write about a class of Americans a lot of people would rather not know about, but he does so with as much insight and literary ability as the ‘greats’ do about the people they write about.

It’s possible it’s not the writers this guy dislikes, but the fact they write about Americans, a people he really doesn’t understand or want to understand – having already made up his mind. I’m Canadian, by the way, and I see some very lazy anti-Americanism every day. If you take out the word “American” and substitute anything else… well, you know.

Rejecting genre stories, or American novels, or even graphic novels as being unworthy of consideration as literature says more about our own prejudices (our fault or not) than it says about anyone else’s writing skills.