for this very entertaining and well-written article. I learned a lot. I had no idea about Pablo Neruda, etc. It makes one think about the uselessness of brain power unallied to heart or common sense.

The Pulitzers aren't awarded until April, dummy.

It's a fairly well-known fact that JFK's Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage was both researched and ghostwritten by others, many of them from Joe Kennedy's personal staff.

While I learned of this in the Joe Kennedy biography, The Sins of the Father, readers may search Cecil Adam's site, The Straight Dope, for the history in brief.

It's encouraging to see so few responses that really berate Grass. If you take the inverse proposition, and try to make saints out of prizewinners who would there be to award prizes too?

Maybe it was my Catholic childhood, where I was taught to seperate the "sin from the sinner."

Maybe it is the fact that I wouldn't want to be judged on the basis of some of the stupid mistakes I made when I was young.

Maybe it is my self-doubt, that's it, the fear of my own self-rightousness that prevents me from requiring perfection in others. Of course I want to be judged personally as a "human being" full of caca.

I know, call me Mr. Naive, but give the prizes to the folks who do the best work, please.

If Harold Pinter is an example of a Nobel Prize deserved, then the Nobel Prizes (and Salon) are even more bankrupt than I thought.

My God, what a bunch of simpering hooey.

For all the ridiculous things Gunter Grass has said in public, and the flaws and secrets he's kept hidden for most of is life... my image of him as an author will always be my first encounter with The Tin Drum. What an astonishing document that is, and always will be. When all of his lesser books have receeded, the Danzig Trilogy will be the only answer I think necessary when asked the question "why should a person like this get a Nobel Prize for Literature?"

About one in ten Nobels for Literature go to someone I care about. In every instance, it's because of the quality of their work, not the quality of their character...

The only relevant question I'd like answered is this: Has anybody who truly loved any of Gunter Grass's novels disowned them because of Grass's revelation of his SS past? How do you deal with Dostoyevsky, Miles Davis, Celine, Wagner, etc., etc.? All were hateful people and sublime artists.

I'm not quite sure what the point here is. Everybody knows how fickle these Nobel literature awards are. Everybody knows that they favour the Northern Europeans. Most of all, everybody knows that they're more political than literary.

Or does everybody?

Perhaps, lest we forget, it's a good thing to restate the obvious from time to time. As Mr. Rafael mentions, it's more of a shock when an actual literary stylist like Faulkner gets the prize than when the usual cherry-picked political quislings in one form or the other receive it.

All one has to do to put the prize in perspective is remind oneself that neither Joyce nor Proust were even CONSIDERED for the prize.---And what if the prize had been around in the past? Does anyone think that the murderer and cutthroat Francois Villon would have been considered by a 15th Century Nobel committee? And what about that bantamweight Shakespeare fellow who staged all those indecent plays before a rowdy mob at The Globe?

"Where are the snows of yesteryear?".....Or is it snow-jobs?

With all due respect to Roy Medvedev, the Kryukov authorship of "And Quiet Flows the Don" has been long debated among the Russian literary community, and long been abandoned. Moreover, Sholokhov had the courage to write to Stalin personally about the devastating impact of mass collectivization on the Don. Granted, he also produced some reeking examples of socialist realism, but perhaps Sholokhov's membership in this literary rogues' gallery should be qualified.

This article, like all the articles written on Grass, fails to mention even a single immoral action that Grass committed. Because we don't know of any. If we still valued that principal in our culture-- you know the one, judging people on what they do instead of whatever group they belonged to-- we would be most concerned with discovering what Grass's conduct was like during his years in the SS. But we don't bother to take part in the messy business of judging people on their works anymore, and we're not particularly interested in finding out the truth about Grass's service. So we just continue to take part in moral short-hand and write insufferably sanctimonious articles like this one.

Lots of interesting information about past Nobel winners but the point is? The Nobel - as with most other prizes - is deeply political and about connections, personal prejudices, lobbying and political expediency. Gandhi never got the peace prize - and rightly so, given that he threatened the Western colonial order so (Kind of like asking Microsoft to reward Steve Jobs). There are a number of writers who are far greater than often pathetic penpushers who do receive the prize. Most of us who truly love literature don't take the Nobel that seriously - and a preponderance of white male writers is only one reason for that.

P R O C L A M A T I O N

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Lo! the inquisition, has spoken, and the following authors, of certifiably weak moral fibre, are anathema!

The sole skills of these literary untouchables have been shown to be plagiarism by scholarly edict; May their reputation burn, preferably in the febrile, insipid & non-allergenic terms sanctioned.

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F.Dostoevsky

L.Tolstoy

F.Neitzche

F.Voltaire

J.London

T.Carlyle

A.Rand

V.Grossman

P.G.Wodehouse

W.Churchill

Bertrand Russell

Plato

======================

Let the faithful read 'A is for Arabs', wherein

they may amuse themselves with watermelons, and vulvas,

as befits the modern enlightened congregation.

Ex Cathedra George Rafael...

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" I believe that a writer's blood should boil when he is writing. That his face should be white with restrained hatred of the enemy he is writing about." –Mikhail A. Sholokhov