The 2013 Nobel Laureate is…

Alice Munro! I picked up a book of short stories yesterday and I’ll write about her when I get to her!

Oops

Don’t worry, I actually did finish reading everything. About a month and a half ago, to be honest. It’s just that I’m in a grad school class that is kicking my butt, and I’ve been running around and getting stuff ready to start teaching high school in the fall. So, yeah. I did this. I’ll write about it on the internet later.

NOBEL PROJECT: COMPLETED

John Steinbeck

THE LAUREATE: John Steinbeck was born in California in 1902 to a dirt-poor family in dirt-poor farm country in California, which informed the majority of his work. He wrote a large number of books, including the staggeringly important and amazing Grapes of Wrath and died in 1968.

MY EXPERIENCE: I loved Grapes of Wrath when I read it in high school and I loved Of Mice and Men when I read it in college. I tried reading Cannery Row and felt too sick to get past the second or third page. We’ll see how this goes.

WHAT I’M READING: The Moon is Down

Eugene O’Neill

THE LAUREATE: Eugene O’Neill was born in a hotel room on Broadway in 1888 (there’s a Starbucks there now). He went to a Catholic boarding school and then spent a year at Princeton. He joined the merchant marine and then the IWW and caught tuberculosis. He was part of the Greenwich Village scene and a lifelong radical.

WHAT I’M READING: “The Hairy Ape”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

THE LAUREATE: I.B. Singer was born in a village near Warsaw in 1902 to a rabbi and a rabbi’s daughter. His brother and sister were also writers, who introduced him to the Yiddish literary world of Warsaw. His family left Poland for the United States in 1935, fleeing the increasingly anti-Semitic culture around them. Settling in New York, Singer continued to publish widely in Yiddish, and frequently translated his own works into English.

WHAT I’M READING: Satan in Goray, Singer’s first published work.

Saul Bellow

THE LAUREATE: Saul Bellow was actually born in Quebec from parents who had emigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia. The family moved to Chicago when Bellow was 9. He read and wrote from an early age, and studied anthropology and sociology. He moved around, teaching at various universities and marrying and divorcing frequently. At his death in 2005, he was lamented as one of the greatest American novelists.

WHAT I’M READING: Henderson the Rain King

Pearl S. Buck

THE LAUREATE: Pearl Sidenstryker was born in West Virginia in 1892 to Presbyterian ministers, who immediately returned to China after she was born. Her father weathered the Boxer Rebellion among the people. Pearl returned to the US to attend Randolf-Macon, and then went back to China where she almost immediately married a land developer. She stayed in China until 1934, when she was forced into retiring as a missionary because she said the Chinese don’t need a centralized, organized religion dominated by missionaries who didn’t care about the Chinese people or their culture. What nerve! She began her prolific writing career after she returned to the US for good. She also started an adoption agency for Asian and mixed-race children that has helped place hundreds of thousands of children and spread to eight countries. She died in 1973.

WHAT I’M READING: The only book by her that anyone has ever heard of, The Good Earth

Gao Xingjian

THE LAUREATE: Gao Xingjian was born in the 1940 in Jianxi, China. He studied French in college and eventually became a professional translator, after spending time as a laborer for the Go Down Into the Country movement. During the 80s, he emigrated to France not long before all his work was banned in China after the Tiananmen Square unpleasantness.

WHAT I’M READING: The stories in Buying a Fishing Rod For My Grandfather, although apparently I should be reading Soul Mountain. Oops.

J. M. Coetzee

THE LAUREATE: J. M. Coetzee was born in 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa. He was largely an academic, teaching in the United States and South Africa until his retirement to Adelaide, Australia, where he is an honorary professor of literature. In addition to his novels, he is a prominent translator of Dutch and Africaans literature, and holds a Ph.D. in Germanic linguistics.

MY EXPERIENCE WITH HIM: I read two of his books before this, Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace. I liked them well enough when I was reading them, but when I thought about them later, I was kind of squicked out by what a prominent role older male authority figures taking sexual advantages of young women play in their plots. I was a little worried about the book I’m reading, which is…

WHAT I’M READING: Diary of a Bad Year

Bertrand Russell

THE LAUREATE: Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 on his family’s estate. His parents were atheists and extremely liberal, but when they died, he was raised by his prim old grandmother. Russell went to Cambridge for mathematics and philosophy, and for a while taught a young go-getter named Ludwig Wittgenstein, because why not? Russell was a lifelong pacifist who frequently voiced very controversial positions. He also revolutionized analytical philosophy and even had an equation named after him.

WHAT I’M READING: I bought the Essential Bertrand Russell, and I’m reading everything in it about religion (which isn’t much.)