The Nobel Prize is considered by many to be the gold standard of literary awards. Every year since 1901, the Swedish foundation has handed out awards to individuals who have made outstanding achievements in chemistry, physics, medicine, literature, and peace. The winners receive a diploma, medal, a cash prize, and bragging rights for, basically, ever. But this year, it doesn't sound like those bragging rights will be going to an American. One of the foundation's electing committee members has made several discouraging remarks about American authors.  

 Horace Engdahl, secretary of the Swedish Academy, gave an interview to the AP last week saying, "Europe is still the center of the literary world." Afterwards, he added that American writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture. …The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."
  These comments have caused the obvious backlash and disapproval of the American literary world.  Harold Augenbraum, director of the National Book Foundation in the US, glibly offered to send Engdahl a reading list. In a New York Times article published Saturday (10/4), Charles McGrath writes: 
"the Nobel selection process is hardly the lofty and purely literary exercise - the 'big dialogue' - that Mr. Engdahl suggests, and it never has been. Whatever else the prize may be, it is not a guarantee of literary excellence. Critics are always pointing out that the list of writers who never won, which includes Tolstoy, Proust, Borges, Joyce, Nabokov and Auden, is far more impressive than the roster of those who did."
 
The next day, Engdahl amended his comments by making a statement to the UK paper, the Guardian: 
There he said that a misunderstanding had occurred and that the Swedish Academy strictly adhered to Alfred Nobel's wish "that in awarding the prize no consideration whatsoever be given to the nationality of the candidates". He added: "It is of no importance, when we judge American candidates, how any of us views American literature as a whole in comparison with other literatures. The Nobel prize is not a contest between nations but an award to individual authors. It is essential to remember that when national feelings run high." He maintained that there was "no reason for any particular author to get upset by my observations."

This comment suggests that despite his out and out bashing of American literature, there is no reason to believe the prize won't go to an American. There are a few American authors who many presumed would be on the shortlist of this year's Nobel Prize candidates. These include Thomas Pynchon, Phillip Roth, and Joyce Carol Oates. But Times author McGrath makes a good point when he suggests that Americans bet on the prize going to an author "whom nobody in this country has ever heard of and who is out of print here or, ideally, has never been published at all."
In any case, this year's Nobel winner will be announced on Thursday. The last American to claim the prize was Toni Morrison in 1993.