I guess there's some ironic justice in this, as many of America's greatest contributions to literature are in SF, a field that literary writers and critics in the US (and everywhere else) often look on in the same way as this Swede looks on American literary writers. Ie. "what have _they_ ever accomplished?"

But then literary fame is not about justice. I've given up counting the number of wonderful authors I've come across by accident, only to find out that they're utterly forgotten and ignored. Perhaps the real problem with the Nobel Prize and other awards is that they give readers the illusion of knowing who the greatest authors are. The odds are that the world's greatest author wrote one promising book which didn't sell well, then gave up writing for a paying job.

Such as Gene Wolfe, the sort of writer who is the ideal Nobelist (instead of the sad lot we actually get). Huge body of work? Check. Formal narrative innovation that rivals any fiction of the past 100 years? Check. Commitment to Big Themes like the nature of reality and truth, human relationships to God, and the effect of culture and choices on the self? Check. He deserves the prize for the Book of the New Sun alone, and given his Long Sun and Short Sun works to boot, he more than qualifies. (Let's leave out all the other novels and the scores of top-quality short stories: I have read a staggering amount of literature published since 1800, and I still think that "Seven American Nights" is one of the best short stories of the past 50 years, maybe longer.)

But the Nobel's failings are too obvious and too well-rehearsed to go over here. I'll just mention an anecdote. Years ago I worked for a rare bookstore famous for being able to find whatever you wanted, an unspeakably difficult thing before the Internet. (While I was there we located a first edition of Newton's Principia with intact gatefold, as well as an Adventures of Santa Claus in mint dust jacket.) We routinely supplied the NYPL with replacements for lost or stolen books, many valuable. And yet there was one customer who stymied the fifteen dedicated researchers at the shop. He merely wanted a first edition of every Nobel prizewinner's cited book (the one the committee mentions when giving the award). We could not fulfill this request. Pearl Buck? Easy. But the overwhelming majority of prizewinners had faded into an obscurity so total that their work couldn't be located anywhere...and money was not an object. It certainly put the Nobel into perspective for me.

Are you familiar with Vardis Fishers Testament of Man series? I have a few and they are quite brilliant. I am surprised he is not mentioned more often as a true expert on the nature of man and his intellectual history.