It is odd that Ibsen was not the first Nobel laureate in literature (given the prize's early Scandinavian bias); it is truly bizarre that he never won.

The absence of Joyce from the laureate list is truly scandalous. It's a surreal omission, a bad joke. I mean, seriously, Pearl-freaking-Buck won the prize but James-bleeping-Joyce did not? What, dear reader, is up with that??

Lawrence was apparently too 'scandalous' for the Nobel. Even the most Lawrentian writer of our time, Doris Lessing, had to wait until age 88 to win, and she greeted the news with words worthy of her illustrious precursor, "Oh, Christ... I couldn't care less."

No Nobel for PROUST?!? You gotta be kidding... Sometimes I suspect that the early juries had something against the very idea of literary Modernism.

Relatively little-known in the English-speaking world, Broch was one of the giants of modern Central European literature.

Hart took a long dive into the Caribbean before the Nobel committee even had a chance to ignore him.

Since they didn't award Breton, they surely couldn't recognize the authentic mad genius of French Surrealism, Antonin Artaud.

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell represented opposite poles in American poetry, but that didn't stop them from influencing each other. The Swedes spurned both.

Well, at least they gave a Nobel to Yeats.

Bulgakov wrote the greatest Russian novel of the Soviet era, better than "Doctor Zhivago," better than Sholokov's Don novels, much better than anything by Solzhenitzyn--even better than Nabokov's Russian novels

The diametric opposite of Henry James, Miller was the first American novelist to be deeply influenced by Surrealism. His long-banned works deeply influenced writers of the 1950s' and 60's.

Bowles, the ultimate American abroad, the one who went away and never came back, the authentic 'traveler' of our Modern literature. He would've been a perfect laureate.

Does/Did the Nobel committee have a problem with representations of homosexuality in literature? It seems so.

Realist, satirist, folklorist, postmodernist, journalist, fantasist--Calvino was all of these things. "Invisible Cities" and "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" are probably the most nobelisable Italian works of the past 50 years.

Were the Swedes waiting for Ellison's second novel?

They overlooked James Baldwin. Unforgivable.

Hughes's enormous body of work made him the most nobelisable Yorkshireman who ever lived.

No Nobel for Witold. He's in excellent company.

Maybe the Nobel jury just didn't 'get' midcentury American drama.

The 2008 death of Robbe-Grillet robbed the Nobel jury of the opportunity to honor the progenitor of the French literary New Wave. His work of the 1950's and 60's was seminal.