Nobel Prize in Literature publicly available at The Nomination Database for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Currently, only nominations submitted between 1901 and 1968 are available for public viewing. This secrecy has led to speculation about the next Nobel laureate. According to Göran Malmqvist of the Swedish Academy, Chinese writer Shen Congwen was to have been awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, had he not suddenly died that year. From 1901 to 1912, the committee, headed by the conservative Carl David af Wirsén, weighed the literary quality of a work against its contribution towards humanity's struggle 'toward the ideal'. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Zola, and
M. and Mme. Joseph Prudhomme M. and Mme. Joseph Prudhomme Monsieur and Madame Prudhomme were a pair of French caricature characters of the 19th century, created by Henry Monnier. They were a bourgeois couple. Monsieur Prudhomme first appeared in 1830 in the first version of the "Scènes de province", then in the play "Grandeur et décadence de M. Joseph Prudhomme" (1852) then in two volumes of collected drawings "Mémoires de Monsieur Joseph Prudhomme" (1857), then in "Monsieur Prudhomme chef de brigands" (1860). Plump, foolish, conformist and sententious, Joseph was called by Honoré de Balzac “l’illustre type des bourgeois de Paris” (the classic example of the