"It should be easy to award a lifetime achievement award in literature."

No Nobel Prize for Literature? Thank Goodness.

"It should be easy to award a lifetime achievement award in literature. Writers have long working lives, and there is plenty of time for reasonable opinion to coalesce. The vast majority of the great writers of the last century were amply feted well before their deaths. The prize originated in 1901 when Leo Tolstoy was almost universally regarded as the greatest living writer. And so the first Nobel Prize in literature went to Sully Prudhomme, a poet not even the most ardent Francophile knows as anything other than the first writer to win the Nobel. Tolstoy didn’t die until 1910, but the academy never saw its way to giving him the prize before he got pneumonia at the Astapovo rail station. Chekhov, Ibsen, Zola, Hardy, James, and Twain were all alive and acclaimed in the first decade of the 20th century. None won the prize, and the course of the literary Nobel was set."