1927 Nobel Prize in Literature

The 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented." He was the second philosopher to gain the Nobel Prize after Rudolf Christoph Eucken won in 1908.

Laureates
Bergson was educated at the Lycée Condorcet and at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy. He developed his philosophy through a series of publications that were well known for their original perspectives on life as well as their effective application of metaphor, imagery, and analogy. In Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience ("Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness", 1889), Bergson proposed the idea that consciousness exists on two levels, the first of which can only be attained by intense introspection, and the second of which is an exterior projection of the first. The notion of time that Bergson had previously proposed in his prior writings was expanded upon and used to investigate living things in L'Évolution Créatrice ("Creative Evolution", 1907). His other principal works include Matière et Mémoire ("Matter and Memory", 1896), Le Rire. Essai sur la Signification du Comique ("Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic", 1900) and Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion ("The Two Sources of Morality and Religion", 1932).

Nominations
Bergson was not nominated in 1927 but in 1928 was awarded for this year. He received a total of ten nominations beginning in 1912 made Scottish author Andrew Lang. In 1928, he received three separate recommendations from members of the French Academy, members of the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences and professors of history of philosophy.

In total, the Nobel Committee received 29 nominations in 1927 for authors such as Kostis Palamas, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Hardy, Guglielmo Ferrero, Rudolf Maria Holzapfel, Olav Duun, Ada Negri and Johannes V. Jensen (awarded in 1944). There were six authors newly nominated namely Cesare Pascarella, Eduard Meyer, Samuel Parsons Scott, Edith Wharton, Édouard Estaunié and Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer. Of the 23 nominees, four were women: Ada Negri, Edith Wharton, Concha Espina de la Serna and Grazia Deledda (awarded for 1926).

The authors Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Bernhard Alexander, Mikhail Artsybashev, Hugo Ball, Kazimir Barantsevich, Margret Holmes Bates, Martin Stanislaus Brennan, Clara Louise Burnham, John Bagnell Bury, Mabel Collins, Roi Cooper Megrue, James Oliver Curwood, Minnie S. Davis, Robert de Flers, Federico De Roberto, Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, Osório Duque-Estrada, Georges Eekhoud, Adolfo León Gómez, Ricardo Güiraldes, Lesbia Harford, Hubert Harrison, Fukuda Hideko, Jerome K. Jerome, Kang Youwei, Gaston Leroux, Agnes Maule Machar, Harriet Earhart Monroe, Süleyman Nazif, Jessie Penn-Lewis, Stanisław Przybyszewski, Fyodor Sologub, Borisav Stanković, Stephan G. Stephansson, Mary Webb, Philip Wicksteed died in 1927 without having been nominated for the prize.

Prize decision
In November 1927, the Swedish Academy announced that no Nobel Prize in Literature would be awarded with the following explanation: "'During the selection process, the Nobel Committee for Literature decided that none of the year's nominations met the criteria as outlined in Alfred Nobel's will. According to the Nobel Foundation's statutes, the Nobel Prize can in such a case be reserved until the following year, and this statute was then applied.'"

After the deliberations in 1928, the Nobel Committee awarded Henri Bergson and Sigrid Undset in 1927 and 1928 respectively. Maxim Gorky and Kostis Palamas had been the main contenders for the 1927 prize, but as a compromise Bergson was the chosen laureate.