Prizes: A Rival for Nobel

• Share

Q. What is the world's top prize in humanities? A. The Nobel Prize for Literature. Q. Who gets it? A. The world's top writers. Q. Like Salvatore Quasimodo, Alexis Leger, Ivo Andric and Giorgos Seferiades? A. Huh?

The gentlemen in question—an Italian, a Frenchman, a Yugoslav, a Greek —are the generally obscure writers who won Nobel Prizes (worth $51,158 this year) between 1959 and 1963. In 62 years of Nobel-picking, the Swedish Academy of Literature has ignored an incredible array of logical candidates—Chekhov, Conrad, Frost, Hardy, Ibsen, Joyce, Sartre, Malraux, Moravia, Pound, Proust, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Zola—not to mention the glaring neglect of non-European writers, notably in China, India and Japan.

The Swedes need backstopping, and last week a U.S. contender was announced by Colorado's Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. Next spring the institute will launch a Nobel rival called the Aspen Award—a $30,000 prize to the one person in the world who "each year makes the greatest contribution to the humanities."

The Aspen Institute, a 7,800-ft. aerie in the Rockies west of Denver, is a nonprofit resort for the mind-and-muscle renewal of U.S. leaders in business, labor and government. It is the brain child of the late Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke, creator of Container Corp. and inspirer of its "Great Ideas of Western Man" advertisements. Now chaired and cheered by Southwest Banker-Rancher Robert O. Anderson, the institute has just elected a renowned resident president: Alvin C. Eurich, head of the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Advancement of Education, and inventor of the Aspen Award.

"Anyone can make a nomination" for the Aspen Award, says Eurich, and candidates may be in any humanistic field, such as philosophy or history, as well as literature. Final selection will be made by such eminences as William DeVane, longtime dean of Yale College, Henry Allen Moe, veteran dispenser of Guggenheim fellowships, and Lord Franks, former British Ambassador to the U.S., now provost of Oxford's Worcester College. The goal: "To recognize those creative persons who are contributing most to the clarification of the individual's role and his relationship to society."