Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, declared that it wasn’t likely an American writer would be getting the Nobel Prize for literature any time soon, because the United States was “too isolated [and] too insular” to produce real literature, like they do in Europe.
The New York Observer added to the aura of doom, gloom, agony, and despair within the Manhattan publishing community, but at least this time the diagnosis wasn’t fatal—just the arrival of “an age in which the gambling spirit that has kept book publishing exciting gives way to a shabby, predictable environment” where only celebrities and authors who’ve already proven themselves are likely to get book deals.
