Literature Nobel Prize Winners in the United States.

1930    Sinclair Lewis

"for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters."

1936    Eugene O’Neill

"for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy."

1938    Pearl S. Buck

"for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces."

1949    William Faulkner

"for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel."

1954    Ernest Hemingway

"for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."

1962    John Steinbeck

"for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception."

1976    Saul Bellow

"for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work."

1978    Issac Bashevis Singer

"for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life."

1980    Czeslaw Milosz

"who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts."

1987    Josif Brodskij

"for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity."

1993    Toni Morrison

"who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."