There is possibly no more humbling experience for some who consider themselves reasonably well-read than looking at the betting odds for the Nobel Prize in Literature. There are usually a few familiar names, but the greater portion are unfamiliar (unless, of course, they were on the sheet last year). There are entire literary traditions and careers out there in the world that I am not only not conversant in but wholly unaware of. There are still so many more books here in my own country that I will never get to: the existence of similar repositories of interesting work is hard to fathom (This brings to mind the truism in mathematics that some infinities are bigger than others. Mull that one for a bit).
That the best odds you can get are 10/1 shows that predicting the Nobel in any given year is tough sledding. But what if you could bet on an author’s lifetime chance of winning the Nobel? Perhaps the rise of prediction markets has me primed to engage in probabilistic thinking like this, but after kicking it around, I thought that making a list of the 50 U.S. authors (either living and working in the U.S. or U.S. citizens living abroad) that I thought most likely to win the Nobel at some point.
These aren’t my favorite writers necessarily (though some of them are) or those I think most deserving (though most if not all of them do), but those I would place chips on, if in some very strange casino I was given 50 chips to place with the hope of one of them hitting.
A few notes on my (very light process):
- Among U.S. writers who have won the Nobel, they were all pretty famous at the time of the award. It might be tempting to go with some small press darling or avant-garde savant, but being well-known for a loooooong time in your home country matters.
- I am bad at poetry. I am sure there are more compelling poets that would warrant a spot, but my feel for that is virtually non-existent.
- I didn’t do much. “Is it wiser to take a younger writer with less of a track record who has decades more to write and work” versus “an established, older writer who has a full resume, but probably not as many years to win.”
- Oh, I am also bad at theater.
- And Bob Dylan won, but I am also not wading into musicians/songwriters. One of one, it seems to me.
- Question: if given a second choice, to take either my field of 50 or…all of the rest of U.S. writers, I am not entirely sure what I would do. I didn’t make a “next 50 list,” though I think I could have gotten there without feeling too strange about the names on it. I think I am taking these 50. Barely.
Ok, and here are the names, in no particular order (and with no rationale offered):
