UPTON SINCLAIR

Waipa Post, Volume 44, Issue 3178, 14 May 1932, Page 6

UPTON SINCLAIR

CANDIDATE FOR NOBEL PRIZE

A determined effort has been made to secure for Mr Upton Sinclair, the American Socialist-novelist, the award by the Swedish Academy of the Nobel prize for literature this year. His nomination for the award, which carjries a cash prize of about £BOOO, has been signed by 770 prominent men fend women representing fifty-five different nations. Over 400 of the signatories are residents of the United States, but 79 are British; and the other countries represented include 'Austria, Brazil Czecho-Slovakia, Germany],- China, Holland, Italy, India, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, Cuba, Esthonia, Ecuador, Egypt, Ireland, (Morocco, and Tasmania. The original impulse to nominate Mr Sinclair came from; a group of professors and writers, including Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Edwin Markham, Harold J. iLaski, Robert Herrick], Wlilliam Henry QLeonard, and Harry Elmer Barnes. Among those who have endorsed the nomination are Bernard Shaw, Laurence Housman, Siegfried Sassoon, May Sinclair, Mrs Thomas Hardy, George Gray Barnard, and members of the Academie Francaise, the Sorbonne, and the Spanish Academy. In comimenting on the nomination of Mr Sinclair for the award, that lively critic, “ 1.M.P.,” who contributes to the New York Herald-Tribune a gossipy article each week about books and authors, states: —

“ We hate to tell these distinguished persons—and such a lot of them! — that, they are utterly hooey, but if no on© else will], here goes. If they feel like giving a prize to Upton Sinclair we have no objection; but why drag in literature ? The Nobel prize is supposed to he given to * one who has produced in the field of literature the most distinguished work of an idealistic tendency.’ Mr Sinclair’s work is about as ‘distinguished’ as 4 Ten Nights in a Bar Room,’ and is not even in the next lot to the field of literature. And some of the recomimenders really ought to know better. Literature has more to contend with than any other art —or science either—because so few people seem able to believe that it exists. They are always talking about two or three other things under the impression that they are discussing literature. Now, we are not going to explain what literature is. But it definitely isn’t the works of Upton Sinclair. For this statement Mp Sinclair may suspect we are subsidised by the Money Octopus. It would be very nice if we were; but no such luck. How would it strike Professor Einstein, or Earl Russell, scientists, if a group of poets rushed in and recommended Henry Ford for the Nobel Physics prize ? Men of note in one branch of intellectual achievement ought not to lend their authority to the destruction of integrity in another branch.”