From The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

It was on this day in 1901 that the first Nobel Prizes were awarded.
The first prize in literature went to Sully Prudhomme, who wrote melancholy, formal poems in French, and whom nobody reads anymore. He said, "In my soul rages a battle without victor. Between faith without proof and reason without charm."
Since 1901, depending on how you count citizenship, 11 Americans have won the Nobel Prize in literature — Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl S. Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Czeslaw Milosz (who had dual citizenship in Poland), Joseph Brodsky, and Toni Morrison. No American has won since Morrison in 1993, and in fact last year the secretary of the Swedish academy publicly complained about American literature. He said, "Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world. … The U.S. is too isolated, too insular."
It's the birthday of Emily Dickinson, (books by this author) born in Amherst in 1830. The famous recluse loved to read, and her favorite writer was Shakespeare, but she kept up with and admired her contemporaries in England and America.
She liked George Eliot, Emily Brontë, and also Charles Dickens — she sent him a letter calling him "dear Dickens," to thank him for teaching her about using language. Her favorite contemporary poets were Robert Browning, John Keats, and especially Elizabeth Barrett Browning, another famous recluse. On the other hand, Dickinson had this to say about Walt Whitman: "I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful." And she said, "Of Poe, I know too little to think — Hawthorne appalls — entices […] of Howells and James, one hesitates."
She said: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

Emily Dickinson (1830–86).

SUCCESS is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,

As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.