THIS IS TOTALLY LONG BUT A GOOD READ and i know we have song sk nerds here. i've bolded and copy pasted a few bits, the rest is at the source

Stephen King Deserves a Nobel Prize - Diaries of an Emotional Miscreant by Zach Davis - journal-news.net | News, sports, jobs, community information for Martinsburg - The Journal



This is a particularly bold statement, seeing as how the Nobel Prize committee awards the annual prize in Literature to a person who has produced a lifetime body of work that enhances the understanding of the human condition and speaks to mankind throughout the generations, evincing an individual idealism along the way. John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Pearl S. Buck, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were all awarded the Nobel Prize, and all have contributed works that, at one time or another, have been cited as some of the best of the 20th century.

This is a particularly bold statement, seeing as how the Nobel Prize committee awards the annual prize in Literature to a person who has produced a lifetime body of work that enhances the understanding of the human condition and speaks to mankind throughout the generations, evincing an individual idealism along the way. John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Pearl S. Buck, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were all awarded the Nobel Prize, and all have contributed works that, at one time or another, have been cited as some of the best of the 20th century.

Although the basic plots of his novels deal with what frighten us, he does not exclusively write horror fiction. King is also a master mystery writer and has been named as a Grand Master by the Mystery Writer’s Guild of America (Elmore Leonard, of whom it can be said that if Shakespeare wrote us and King wrote our nightmares than Elmore Leonard wrote our dialogue, also shares the title of Grand Master). His novel Bag of Bones is more romantic and has more to say about love and loss than any and all of Nicholas Spark’s books combined.

The current state of the Nobel Prize for literature is one of lackluster European-centric, heavily-politicized writings. Has anyone actually read anything by JMG Le Clézio or Herta Müller, the awardees for 2008 and 2009, respectively? The list of people who did not receive a Nobel for Literature and should have is nearly as long as the list of those who have. Mark Twain, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Roth, and Arthur Miller share the commonality of having written tremendous works of literature and of being ignored by the Nobel committee. An American has not been awarded the Nobel for seventeen years, during which time 13 Europeans were awarded the prize.

In 2008, a member of the Academy for nomination and award stated that “Europe is still the center of the literary world” and that “the US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” Stephen King’s works have been translated into over 32 languages, most of them European, although his works have been published on every single continent except Antarctica. He is arguably the single most recognized name in world literature today, with a reputation that almost everyone instantly recognizes. Without going so far as to address in full the rather specious assertion that Europe is the center of the literary world, it is clear that the majority of books read and sold in the world are written by American authors.

please feel free to harp on about your fave stephen king books here. i haven't read him much since i was a teenage goth but i enjoyed the **** out of under the dome last year

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one incapable of her own distress

Surely if you are going to give the Nobel prize for literature to a hugely published and widely read American on the basis that America produces more books, it should go to the awful James Patterson? He is the world's best selling author (sadly) and according to wiki, sells more books than Stephen King, Dan Brown and John Grisham combined.

I voted **** yeah but I'm not sure he necessarily deserves something like the Nobel - but to call him a terrible writer or to (lol) place him in the leagues of Patterson et al is wrong. His early novels are etched into the American consciousness and are, as I'm sure someone like geek or Wildwoman could agree, more than just damn good horror novels. There's a certain zeitgeist in those classic novels, and I think to label him a horror writer is too narrow.

There is no other popular mainstream author that can compare.

he should win. he should win the nobel peace prize.

i knew someone would say that

i dont particularly care about him or nobel prizes, but i did enjoy they american/yuropeen standoff the blogger is going for

and who knew the prize was a million monies?

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one incapable of her own distress