1932 Nobel Prize in Literature

The 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the British author John Galsworthy (1867–1933) "for his distinguished art of narration which takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga". When Galworthy was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, only the second English author to receive the award since its inception in 1901.

Laureate
John Galsworthy is best known for the novel sequence The Forsyte Saga which chronicles the lives of three generations of a large, upper-middle-class family at the turn of the 19th/20th century. Galsworthy was also a successful playwright who examined controversial ethical or social problems in plays such as Strife (1909), Justice (1910) and Loyalties (1922).

The Forsyte Saga
The first book in this extensive series was published in 1906. The upper middle classes and Galsworthy's own upbringing were harshly criticized in The Man of Property. Galsworthy did not start working on it right away; he had to wait fifteen years, during which World War I broke out, before he started again with In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921). He had penned a sizable quantity of plays, short stories, and novels in the interim. The three volumes of A Modern Comedy, The White Monkey (1924), The Silver Spoon (1926), Swan Song (1928), and its two interludes, A Silent Wooing and Passersby (1927), carried on the Forsyte Saga. These should be supplemented with a collection of short stories called On Forsyte Change (1930). Of Galsworthy's 20 novels, nine are about the Forsytes (the last three tangentially so) and the other eleven are all one-off stories.

Nominations
John Galsworthy was nominated six times (1919–1922, 1931 and 1932) before he was awarded the prize in 1932. His first nomination came from Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1864–1931), the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. Others were from the persistent recommendation by other academy members such as Anders Österling, Martin Lamm, and Henrik Schück.

In total, the Nobel Committee received 48 nominations for 31 writers which included Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Ivan Bunin (awarded in 1933), Frans Eemil Sillanpää (awarded in 1939), Johannes V. Jensen (awarded in 1944), Paul Valéry, Kostis Palamas, Olav Duun, and H. G. Wells. Nine of the nominees were newly nominated namely Percival Elgood, Michael Blümelhuber, Grigol Robakidze, Axel Munthe, Francesco Orestano, Karel Čapek, Vilhelm Ekelund, Manuel Gálvez and Upton Sinclair. The Spanish author Concha Espina de la Serna was the only female nominee.

The authors Christopher Brennan, Mona Caird, Charles W. Chesnutt, Hart Crane, Evelyn Everett-Green, J. Meade Falkner, Kenneth Grahame, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Augusta Gregory, Jonas Mačiulis (known as Maironis), Gustav Meyrink, Harold Monro, Iacob Negruzzi, Giuseppe Peano, Sibylle Riqueti de Mirabeau (known as Gyp), Ahmed Shawqi, Frederick Jackson Turner, Edgar Wallace, Henry S. Whitehead and Emma Wolf died in 1932 without having been nominated for the prize.

Reactions
The choice of John Galsworthy caused a group of young Swedish authors to protest against the Swedish Academy's conservatism by sending a telegram to the Russian author Maxim Gorky, regretting that he hade not been awarded the prize.

Award ceremony speech
In his award ceremony speech on 10 December 1932, Anders Österling of the Swedish Academy praised the Forsyte Saga as "a masterpiece of an energetic, firm, and independent account of human nature", noting that the two trilogies "together form an unusual literary accomplishment. The novelist has carried the history of his time through three generations, and his success in mastering so excellently his enormously difficult material, both in its scope and in its depth, remains an extremely memorable feat in English literature"