Nobel Laureates in Literature

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Murder in the Cathedral is a verse drama by T.S. Eliot that portrays the final days of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was assassinated and martyred in 1170. Written in 1935 for the Canterbury Festival, the play explores themes of faith, power, martyrdom, and the conflict between church and state. Many stage performances of the play have been produced, and Murder in the Cathedral has also been adapted for television, film, and opera... Read Murder in the Cathedral Summary

My Name is Red (originally titled Benim Adim Kirmizi) is a 1998 historical novel by the Nobel Prize winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. Set in late-16th century Istanbul, the novel explores cultural tensions stemming from contemporary philosophical understandings of visual art. Told from the viewpoints of many different animate and inanimate characters—including Muslim and Jewish individuals, a corpse, the color red, and paintings of a horse, a devil, and a dog—the novel integrates elements of... Read My Name is Red Summary

Nausea is a philosophical novel by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Originally published in 1938, the novel was first translated to English in 1949. Nausea takes place in the fictional French city of Bouville (“Mud Town”) and follows the day-to-day life of the reclusive historian Antoine Roquentin. Antoine lives completely alone, without friends or family, as he researches and writes a book on an 18th-century French aristocrat, the Marquis de Rollebon. Antoine’s daily interactions with... Read Nausea Summary

Book Details & Major ThemesNever Let Me Go is a 2005 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro set in a dystopian version of Great Britain in the 1990s in which cloning technology allows for the mass proliferation of organ donation. Medical problems like cancer are cured because organs are harvested from clones through a state-sanctioned program. The cloned “donors” have their organs taken one at a time until they die. The novel is narrated by Kathy H... Read Never Let Me Go Summary

No Exit (1944) is a play by French philosopher, writer, and critic Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was drafted into the French army during World War II and spent nearly a year as a German prisoner of war. He then wrote and debuted No Exit in Paris while the city was still under German occupation and control. No Exit is comprised of one act which takes place in a single room in the afterlife, which the characters... Read No Exit Summary

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Set in the seaport city of Santa María de Antigua, in colonial Spanish Colombia, at the end of the 18th century, Gabriel García Márquez'snovel Of Love and Other Demons tells the tragic story of Sierva María de Todos Los Ángeles. The only daughter of the American-born Marquis de Casalduero, Sierva lives with her father the Marquis, and her mother, Bernarda, in a decaying mansion.Neither parent takes an interest in their daughter, so she's raised by... Read Of Love And Other Demons Summary

American author John Steinbeck published his novella Of Mice and Men in 1937. Despite its place in the classical canon, the novella is one of the most challenged books of the 21st century due to its depiction of violence and use of profane, racist language. The novella’s title is an allusion to Scottish poet Robert Burns’s 1785 poem “To a Mouse,” in which a farmer unwittingly and regrettably kills a mouse while plowing. Of Mice... Read Of Mice and Men Summary

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South African author Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) published the short story “Once Upon a Time” in 1989 while South Africa was still under apartheid, an institutionalized system of racism that from 1948 until 1994 discriminated against all people who were not white. Gordimer was the daughter of Jewish immigrants. Though not an Afrikaner (a South African descended from 17th-century Dutch colonizers), Gordimer was white and therefore part of South Africa’s ruling minority. Gordimer wrote about characters... Read Once Upon a Time Summary

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, first published in 1962 in the USSR, is a novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It follows the protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, during a typical day in the forced labor camp where he is imprisoned. The novel explores the human cost of Stalinism in Soviet Russia. Shukhov and the other prisoners waver between unity and division as they attempt to survive in the labor camp, which is situated far... Read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Summary

One Hundred Years of Solitude, first published in Spanish in 1967 as Cien años de soledad, is an internationally renowned and classic work of literature by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. The most highly regarded English version of the book is Gregory Rabassa’s translation, which was first published in 1970. This guide uses citations from the HarperPerennial Modern Classics Edition, which was released in 2006. García Márquez became the fourth Latin American winner of the... Read One Hundred Years of Solitude Summary

Palace Walk is a 1956 novel by Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz. The story takes place in Cairo during World War I and in its immediate aftermath, touching on the political climate of the time as Egypt transitioned from British occupation to nationalism. The novel presents this change through the day-to-day life of the Muslim al-Jawad family. This guide refers to the 1994 Black Swan edition of the novel, which was translated by William Maynard Hutchins... Read Palace Walk Summary

Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise was published in 1997, just a few years after she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. According to Morrison, it is the last book of a trilogy that includes Beloved and Jazz. Morrison is an esteemed American novelist, having also received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1998) and the Coretta Scott King Award for Authors (2005), among other awards. She was educated at Howard University and Cornell University, and... Read Paradise Summary

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