Irish prose fiction the literary technique known as "stream of consciousness", best exemplified in his famous work "Ulysses". Joyce also wrote "Finnegans Wake", "Dubliners", and the semi-autobiographical "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". "Ulysses", often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century, is the story of a day in the life of a city, Dublin. "Finnegans Wake" is written in an invented language which parodies English, Irish and Latin. Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, was born in Dublin but later moved to France. He wrote thereafter in French and English.
Nobel Prize in Literature our age". Steinbeck himself, when asked if he deserved the Nobel on the day of the announcement, replied: "Frankly, no." In 2012 (50 years later), the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a "compromise choice" among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean Anouilh and Danish author Karen Blixen. The declassified documents showed that he was chosen as the best of a bad lot: "There aren't any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation," wrote committee member Henry