SOURCE: “Nobelity Without Authenticity,” in The National Observer, Vol. 14, No. 4, January 25, 1975, p. 21.

In the following negative assessment of White's fiction, Frank deems White's short stories “disappointing,” arguing that while they exhibit a “verbal richness” and “psychological acumen,” they feature characters who never seem real and plots that “verge on melodrama.”

The Nobel Prize for Literature has often been a suspect award. Writers have frequently been honored not for their literary greatness, but for their moral courage (Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn) or for their good fortune in coming from a country that had not yet had a winner in this most famous of literary sweepstakes.

No one can deny that in their desire to honor literature, morality, and nationalism, the Nobel committee has at times immortalized some deservedly neglected authors. (Remember that of the six Americans to receive the prize, three were Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, and Pearl Buck.) On the...