SOURCE: Pratt, William. “Missing the Masters: Nobel Literary Prizes in English, 1967-1987.” World Literature Today 62, no. 2 (spring 1988): 225-28.

In the following essay, Pratt speculates on the reasons why some of the most famous writers in British and American literature have not been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

What do Mark Twain, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Robert Penn Warren, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Lowell all have in common? They happen to be British and American writers of this century who have not won the Nobel Prize in Literature. And what do Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, and William Golding all have in common? They are British and American writers who have received the Nobel Prize. Comparing...