Poetic License, or The Case of the False Lede

David Orr has an Ideas & Trends piece in today's New York Times that opens with this paragraph:

LAST Thursday, the Swedish Academy announced that the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was the Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, immediately disappointing every writer not named Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio and prompting the standard complaints from fans of authors with names like Roth and Updike. Yet, lost in the usual Nobel drama was a larger, stranger and nearly unexplainable fact: While American fiction and theater can boast of at least a few Nobel winners (nine, to be precise), no American poet has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not one, in more than 100 years.

Consider those last two paragraphs.

First, Orr writes that the United States "can boast of at least a few Nobel winners" in fiction and theater—and then immediately self-corrects by saying "nine, at least." That's considerably more than a few.

Then Orr stresses that "no American poet has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not one, in more than 100 years."

Sounds pretty clear, doesn't it? None. Zero. Nada.

Except that Orr self-corrects in the next paragraph. Sort of.

There are two typical responses to this information. The first is to note that T. S. Eliot, Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz have a connection to the United States and did, in fact, win the Nobel. Yet while Eliot was born in St. Louis, his status as an American poet is debatable. He had been living in England for more than 30 years when he received the prize in 1948, and had been a British citizen for over 20 of them. It seems as reasonable to call him an English writer who was born in America as an American writer who lived in England. And while Brodsky and Milosz were both United States citizens when they became Nobel laureates, they were also both exiles from authoritarian regimes and were clearly being recognized for their work in and about their homelands, not their connection to their adopted country.

Sorry, Orr, but the fact is that, nine Americans have won the Nobel for their work in theater and fiction...and three American poets have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. You might have a valid point to make about the poets, but your lede is, to put it kindly, a red herring.

NOBEL: LESSING WINS MORE

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

....Because of her outspoken views, the governments of both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa declared her a “prohibited alien” in 1956.—The New York Times

"When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s," she told the AP in an interview a year ago. "What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire — nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?"—NPR

I do have different kinds of readers. Some of them hate, for example, my so-called science fiction, and others hate my realistic fiction, and so on, and so on. I was once in San Francisco when in the audience, a man stood up and said, "I hope you're not gonna waste any more time writing your realistic fiction." And then, somebody else stood up, and said, "I hope you're not going to waste any more time writing science fiction." And they got into bitter argument, and I just sat and listened.—PBS

Lessing herself, who was shopping at the time of the Nobel announcement, was less reverent in her response to the news. "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot," she said to the reporters gathered outside her home in north London. "It's a royal flush."—Guardian Unlimited