Forgotten, Famous and Favourite Nobel Literature Prize Winners, T.S. Eliot to Hemingway (1948-1954)

Anglo-Americans, Cold War Warriors, and CIA spies

The Nobel Prize for Literature left the horrors of the Second World War and entered the divisions of the Cold War. Between 1948 and 1954 the seven winners included:

• five of the most famous Anglo-American authors of the 20th century

• the British Prime Minister who coined the term, “iron curtain” for the Cold War partition of Europe, and

• the great American stylist who was a CIA spy.

Since 1901, 120 writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some are forgotten. Many remain famous. A few became notorious for reasons that might surprise you and change your understanding of modern history. Discover them all in the 120 Nobels Challenge and let me know your favourites.

This week, we read the winners from 1948 to 1954:

• 1948 T.S. Eliot, USA/Britain

• 1949 William Faulkner, USA

• 1950 Bertrand Russell, Britain

• 1951 Pär Lagerkvist, Sweden

• 1952 François Mauriac, France

• 1953 Winston Churchill, Britain

• 1954 Ernest Hemingway, USA

Voiceover is available if you want to listen on a walk or while doing some chores.

1948 Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) USA/Britain

T.S. Eliot is one of the most famous modernist poets to have won the Nobel Prize. Born in America to an elite Boston family, he adopted the manner of an aristocratic, conservative, British Anglican. In 1927 he renounced American citizenship, and misread the timing of the American century.

His poems are modern classics: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), The Waste Land (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four Quartets (1943). He wrote plays, and in 1939, on the cusp of war, the light verse Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. This relief from his otherwise gloomy poems was adapted in the 1980s as the musical, Cats. Given Eliot’s disdain for popular culture, it is paradoxical that his fame was revived by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

When I was young the proto–surrealist opening line of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was still a banner of literary rebellion among Australian university students.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table.

The Wasteland is the allusive classic of literary modernism. My favourite Eliot poem, however, is Four Quartets. It was composed over seven years while cultured Europe collapsed into barbaric war. In this horror, Eliot heard modern incantations of ancient philosophies.

In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass”

‘East Coker’

Like several European Laureates, Eliot was influenced by Indian sacred texts in his poetry and outlook.  He knew the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Buddhist texts. He adapted them, notably in Four Quartets. Scholars debate the fidelity of Eliot’s use of these texts. They question whether his prejudicial attitudes, such as his racialist sentiments, distorted his reading. Nonetheless, one of the surprises of this reading challenge for me has been how many early Nobel laureates reached beyond the West for literary inspiration. 

Eliot was another great writer who was a lesser man. Scholars have shown him to be an anti-Semite, an embarrassment for one of the first Nobel Prizes after the Holocaust. He treated his wife cruelly, like other Laureates. Tom and Vivienne’s marriage was troubled for many reasons. They separated in 1933. In 1938 Vivienne was involuntarily committed by her family to a mental hospital. As happened then, before psychotropic medication, Vivienne never left her asylum. She died in medical captivity in 1947. 

In the 1960s, Eliot confessed he was never happy in the marriage, but absolved himself of any wrong. His suffering had created great poetry. His ruined marriage had made The Waste Land. Eliot was an artist-monster, a common figure, celebrated as a semi-god in the twentieth century. 

Though a great experimental modernist in art, he was deeply conservative in politics. He defied the democratic ethos of the post-1945 world in his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948). This long essay argued that a civilised society needed a class system and an aristocracy of talent. The highest levels of culture could only be achieved, Eliot argued by small groups of people who perfected their traditions over long periods of time. It was an argument to restore the European cultural aristocracy of the pre-1939 world. It expressed alarm about the impact of mass secondary education. Like many prophets of cultural decay, Eliot got a little carried away in his doom loops.

“The culture of Europe has deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by no means the oldest among us. And we know that, whether education can foster and improve culture or not it can surely adulterate and degrade it. For there is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards, and more and more abandoning those subjects by which the essentials of our culture … are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.”

T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture

His defiance of the democratic ethos of the victorious democracies of the West found many supporters on the conservative side of the Cold War. His image of “barbarian nomads” hinted at the long-demonised opponents of civilised Europe, the barbarian communists of Eurasia. The image established Eliot as the preeminent poet of the conservative Cold War. He would remain one of the Anglo-American world’s premier poets for most of that dread crusade. You can read Eliot’s famous essay here.

1949 William Faulkner (1897–1962) USA

Faulkner was the great American writer of the defeated South. His novels and stories are set in Mississippi, where Faulkner was born and lived. 

His early fiction was rejected by publishers and art was the victor. Because the rejection liberated Faulkner from the desire for commercial success. He created an experimental prose style and invented the fictional Yoknapatawpha County of his great novels. A series of extraordinary literary tragedies followed: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and The Wild Palms. In Requiem for a Nun, he wrote the line, treasured in the Burning Archive: “the past is not dead, the past is not even past.”

His style brought the reader into the stream of consciousness of his characters. Conventions of punctuation were discarded. Sentences become long, flowing dramas. His characters ruminated over the lingering traumas of the USA civil war. His books are hard work, but worth the effort.

I read several of his novels in my twenties, and tried to reconnect with them this week. But I just could not do it. However, I was a little surprised to discover that the prose was less experimental than I had recalled. It was as if his style was an initiation rite from the 1950s for the more radical literary experiments I have spent so many hours reading. I confused the entrance to this maze with the path.

I have kept my profile of Faulkner shorter than most. He is so well-known. He remains famous, although perhaps he is passing into forgotten. His works regrettably are not available free on the internet, but will for sure be available at your public library.

1950 Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) Britain

I will also be brief with the 1950 winner, Bertrand Russell. He was the third philosopher to win the Prize. The Nobel Committee celebrated “his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". 

But these ideals had travelled a long way from his early work on the principles of mathematics and Russell’s pacifist resistance to World War One. By 1950, the year after the USA, Britain and Western powers had formed NATO, Russell would become another cultural prize of the early Cold War.

Russell was a major figure in English analytic philosophy, alongside figures like A.N. Whitehead. Its style was logical, unlike the more poetic traditions of European philosophy, such as Heidegger, who at this time was writing dark notebooks in disgrace in the Black Forest, after his support for Nazi Germany. The analytical style suited Russell’s temperament. He was also a mathematician. His greatest achievement in philosophy, however, was arguably not his writing. He taught the greater, more enigmatic Ludwig Wittgenstein, who ended his book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with the recluse’s motto:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.

In World War One, Russell was a pacifist and opponent of empire. He was jailed for his protests. Through the 1920s, he advocated a new period of history without war. He was not alone in these years. There was broad support for peace and internationalism, in part associated with support for the Soviet Union. Russell, a British aristocrat and Fabian, even visited the Soviet Union in these years. But he did not like what he saw. He began to change his posture when the Great Imperial War began in 1931. Russell supported a peaceful accommodation of Germany and Britain that would avert the disaster of another European war, and reunite Western Europe to resist the threat of Bolshevism. There were many people who thought the same in these decades.  This resistance to the drums of war has since been distorted as “appeasement”. 

When Britain negotiated with Germany at Munich in 1938, Britain’s greatest philosopher was on the side of Chamberlain, not the hawkish Churchill. He changed his mind in 1943, when he described war as a necessary "lesser of two evils.”  After World War II, he went further. He championed the new American century because he opposed Soviet rule. He labelled the rival system totalitarian, and even provided a justification for the use of nuclear weapons. 

In a speech in 1948, he argued it would be morally worse to go to war after the USSR possessed an atomic bomb than before it possessed one. If the USSR had no bomb, the Anglo-American victory would come more swiftly. There would be fewer casualties than if there were atomic bombs on both sides. The time to strike was now, or so Russell claimed as Churchill’s iron curtain came down across Europe. Many understood Russell to have advocated a first strike in a nuclear war with the USSR. It is hard to see it otherwise. Thankfully, within a year, the USSR obtained a nuclear weapon, and the era of deterrence by mutually assured destruction began.

Russell’s prize was another case of the Nobel Prize joining the new Cold War. In the 1950s, Russell would become a senior figure in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded anti-communist organisation. The pacifist had aged into a Cold War warrior. He would later criticise the Vietnam War and support nuclear disarmament. But like so many philosophers, he was a poor guide to political judgement.

I have not attempted to read Russell’s analytical philosophy texts. You can, however, read online his book Why men fight. It argued that men fight primarily due to fear, acquisitiveness, and vanity. It is part of a modern tradition of liberal thought that imagined the causes of war can be eliminated. It can be contrasted with the deep history of organised violence in Richard Overy’s magisterial new book, Why War? (2024). Is empirical history or analytical philosophy better to understand the endless phenomenon of war? I choose the historian.

1951 Pär Lagerkvist (1891–1974) Sweden

Pär Lagerkvist was a major Swedish writer of the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s he became the most widely translated Swedish writer in the Western world. But today it is difficult to find his works online. I read him for the first time in this challenge. I suspect he has passed into the halls of the forgotten.

He wrote plays, novels, stories, poetry, essays, autobiography, and voluminous private notebooks. Indeed, he saw his writing as a form of personal exploration. On his death, he donated his enormous collection of private notebooks and unpublished writing to the Swedish national library. The new sources changed how Swedish scholars interpreted Lagerkvist. While still alive, Lagerkvist was an extremely private man who shunned publicity, avoided literary groups, and exposed next to no details of his personal life. He reminded me of the famously reclusive French writer, Maurice Blanchot. But after death, Lagerkvist’s published and private writing found a way to eternity in the burning archives of Sweden.

Lagerkvist was born in 1891 in southern Sweden. In 1910 he went to Uppsala as a student and in 1913 he left for Paris, where he was exposed to the work of Pablo Picasso. He studied medieval art and Indian and Chinese literature. His first collection of poetry was published in 1916. He would go on to such a successful literary career that he was chosen to join the Swedish Academy in 1940. He did not, however, vote on his own prize.

Lagerkvist was a child of rural, pietistic, Lutheran Sweden, but broke from religious belief in young adulthood. But the practice of religious thought continued in his writing. He reminded me of many post-Christian, post-1945 writers in Australia and across the West, who no longer believed in God, but could not escape the religious mind. His writing explored the struggle between good and evil, and other dualistic dimensions of the human condition. Like Eliot and Hesse, he found, in Eastern sacred texts and Christian scripture, a spare simplicity that broke from early twentieth-century naturalism and symbolism.

The Dwarf is a highly symbolic, psychological novel set in Renaissance Italy. It presents a flawed narrator who holds a difficult but distorted truth. 

Barabbas is based on a Biblical story. When the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate offers to free either Jesus or Barabbas (a convicted thief and murderer), a Jerusalem mob demands the release of Barabbas, who later watches Jesus as he bears the cross to Golgotha, witnesses the crucifixion, and then spends the rest of his life trying to understand why he was chosen to live rather than Jesus. 

His novels are considered masterpieces, but I could not find free links online. I had planned to travel to the State Library to read them there, but shelved that plan due to time. 

However, I was able to find this poem (translated by W. H. Auden and a Swedish colleague) so that you can say you have read at least one complete work of this now obscure winner of the 1951 Nobel Prize.

My friend is a stranger, someone I do not know.

A stranger far far away.

For his sake my heart is full of disquiet

because he is not with me.

Because, perhaps, after all he does not exist.

Who are you who so fill my heart with your absence?

Who fill the entire world with your absence?

You who existed before the mountains and the clouds,

before the sea and the winds.

You whose beginning is before the beginning of all things,

and whose joy and sorrow are older than the stars.

You who from eternity have wandered among the stars of the Milky Way

and through the great darknesses between them.

You who were alone before loneliness,

and whose heart was full of disquiet before any human heart do not forget me.

But how could you possibly remember me?

How could the sea possibly remember the sea-shell that once it surged through.

1952 François Mauriac (1885–1970) France

Mauriac was the major, liberal-conservative writer of mid-century France. He even wrote a biography of Charles de Gaulle, the leader of France through the early Cold War, who also initiated the détente that began its end.

Mauriac was a poet, critic, Christian Catholic moralist, playwright, autobiographer, and, above all, a novelist.

His novels changed direction from the vast roman fleuve of Proust and du Gard. He focussed his narratives on epiphanies, like Joyce in Dubliners. They were concentrated on symbolic moments of a character’s flowering. They were composed in poetic prose laced with dense symbolism. He painted the struggles of the human heart as a detailed miniature of the moral universe.

He wrote of themes of the division of innocent childhood and the spoliation of adolescence, and moral struggles after the death of God. In Kiss for the Leper, Mauriac portrayed an heir to fortune, Jean Péloueyre, who is yet a kind of monster. Ugly, antisocial, and immoral, he is the leper of the title. A local priest marries the spoiled aristocrat to the most beautiful girl of the local village. Will the marriage provide Jean love or redemption? Will the sacrifice destroy them both? The violence of the arrangements tests both simple ideas of Christian morality and Nietzschean notions of the will to power that can break the slave morality of Christianity.

“There are no Masters. We are all of us born slaves and we grow into the freedom of the Lord.”

Mauriac, Kiss for the Leper 

The narrative of the conflict between Master and Slave was crucial to intellectual life in mid-century France, and the later history of the Cold War. It had been articulated in Hegel, and expressed as class struggle in Marx. Nietzsche rewrote it as a story of morality and the transvaluation of all values. The narrative was disseminated in the 1930s by the celebrated lectures of Alexandre Kojève on Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. Kojève was a Russian émigré, nephew of the painter Kandinsky, and profoundly influential thinker for many strands of European culture, and later American neo-conservatism through his student, Leo Strauss. After 1945, Kojève became one of the central planners of the new European Economic Community and advocate of a third way in Europe between the USA and the USSR. In 1989, twenty years after his death and at the end of the Cold War, the Japanese-American neoconservative, Francis Fukuyama used Kojève to argue that the end of history had come. The Unipolar Illusion had begun.

But that is another story. In the 1930s and 1940s Mauriac suffered the ambiguities of life in a society of strife and rising political extremism on the left, right and centre. In the 1930s he weakly supported elements of the Action Française, the French fascists. The Spanish Civil War turned him away from those ideas. During the German occupation of France, he flirted with Pétain, the leader of the Vichy regime. After the war, French society had to face the moral difficulties of life after total war, and the division of its loyalties between socialism and capitalism. Many French writers and politicians had collaborated with the Vichy regime. Some were quickly executed. Others hid their sins. Some supported the Soviet Union; there are even theories that Kojève was a Russian spy. The later Nobel Laureate, Albert Camus, argued all collaborators should be purged. Mauriac clashed with the humanist rebel. He sought forgiveness and promoted national reconciliation. In the new culture of the Cold War, when McCarthyism soared in America, Mauriac may be best remembered as a wise, flawed champion of compassion.

1953 Winston Churchill (1874–1965) Britain

Yes, that is right. It is not a typo. Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The wartime Prime Minister of Britain, who would fight on the beaches, and never surrender, did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. He won the Literature Prize.

Moreover, in 1953 Churchill was serving his second term (1951-1955) as Prime Minister of Britain. He was the first serving national political leader to win the Literature Prize. 

The Swedish Academy awarded Churchill the Prize "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for his brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values." Churchill was a prolific writer, but, as Geoffrey Wheatcroft notes in Churchill’s Shadow: the Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill (2021) he had many assistants from the 1920s to write his many books. Above all, his prize was a celebration of his wartime speeches and his Cold War rhetoric. Churchill had coined the term “iron curtain” to describe the partition of Europe. The 1953 prize was one of the most political choices in the history of the prize.

Where to begin with Winston Churchill? Where to end with Winston Churchill? He is one of the most heavily mythologised persons in modern Anglophone history. Wheatcroft documents how the Churchill myth was warmly embraced by post-1945 America. His enduring mythology is his own creation in the books that earned the prize. His histories of the First and Second World Wars turned Winston into the heroic voice in the wilderness who opposed appeasement of authoritarianism. This myth is regularly invoked today, including in debates in the US Congress on Ukraine, Gaza and every second endless war.

If you read his long, imperial histories of the English-speaking peoples, you will understand better Churchill’s intent in both the World Wars and the Cold War. He wanted to keep the British Empire strong for another few generations. I would avoid those histories and his over-imitated oratory. Rather, I would read his history of World War One, especially the opening volume The World Crisis: 1911-1914. It was published in six volumes between 1923 and 1931. There is much vindication of his appalling decisions that caused so much death at Gallipoli, in India, in Europe, and in the Soviet Union. All volumes are available at the Internet Archive. Volume One provides insight into both the crisis of British liberalism before 1914, and Churchill’s powerful prose that mythologised the Empire’s defence of freedom.

In the beginning of the twentieth century men were everywhere unconscious of the rate at which the world was growing. It required the convulsion of the war to awaken the nations to the knowledge of their strength. For a year after the war had begun hardly anyone understood how terrific, how almost inexhaustible were the resources in force, in substance, in virtue, behind every one of the combatants. The vials of wrath were full: but so were the reservoirs of power. (p.11)

Many have judged Churchill as a politician and a man. But how to judge Winston as a writer? Did he deserve the literature prize? Wheatcroft wrote acidly:

He wasn’t the worst writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (not when the list includes Pearl S. Buck), but in truth he was never destined to be a great writer. At his best his work is intelligent, vigorous and readable, and he could have written better books than he did.” 

Geoffrey Wheatcroft Churchill’s Shadow: the Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill (2021) p. 399

But in 1953 the Swedish Academy was overtaken by Cold War blinkers and the Anglo-American cultural war for the world.

1954 Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) U.S.A.

The choice of Hemingway expressed the same spirit. Five of seven Nobels during the early Cold War went to Anglo-Americans. Hemingway was a spy for the CIA. What more can be said? 

And his style?

He defined the ruling literary style of post-1945 America. Short. Spare. Breathless. Such a contrast to old Winston’s grandiloquent phrases. A breath of fresh air.

It was a very masculine style. Written by a man fascinated by war, bull-fighting and espionage.

The story of his life as spy is told by a former CIA agent (reliably or not I do not know) in Nicholas Reynolds, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, 1935-1961 (2017).

He became a victim of the Cold War too. And suffered that all-American twentieth-century writer’s flaw. He was a dreadful drunk. In 1961 he shot himself, two months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

You can read online In Our Time and For Whom the Bell Tolls. I have always known that phrase from Donne, but only read Hemingway’s adaptation this week.

If he had known how many men in history have had to use a hill to die on it would not have cheered him any for, in the moment he was passing through, men are not impressed by what has happened to other men in similar circumstances any more than a widow of one day is helped by the knowledge that other loved husbands have died. Whether one has fear of it or not, one's death is difficult to accept. Sordo had accepted it but there was no sweetness in its acceptance even at fifty-two, with three wounds and him surrounded on a hill.

Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

I never really liked Hemingway’s heritage of style. I always preferred the longer lines of the roman fleuve. 

I hope I have not offended you, if you love him, by this brief parodic imitation.