The 1960 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French poet Saint-John Perse (1887âÂÂ1975) "for the soaring flight and the evocative imagery of his poetry which in a visionary fashion reflects the conditions of our time"
Sain-John Perse, pseudonym for Alexis Leger, was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, where his family owned two plantations: a coffee and a sugar plantation. His family went back to France in 1899 and settled in Pau. In 1911, he published his first poetry collection ÃÂloges and Other Poems which was almost completely ignored at the time, and one of the few writers who paid it any attention was Marcel Proust, who praised him as a creative young poet, but afterwards, in 1912, he started earning steady success with the help of Valery Larbaud and André Gide. His poetry, admired especially by literary circles, has been compared to that of Arthur Rimbaud. In 1914, he joined the French diplomatic service and spent many years abroad in various countries. While working as a consul in China, he wrote Anabase ("Anabasis", 1924), an epic poem that puzzled many critics. In 1940, he began a long exile in the U.S. in Washington, D.C. wherein much of his poetry has a profoundly personal tone, as in Exil (1942; "Exile"), Vents (1946; "Winds") and Amers (1957; "Seamarks").
Saint-John Perse was nominated for the prize 15 times, including one nomination by 1937 Nobel laureate Roger Martin du Gard in 1956 and three nominations by the 1948 Nobel Prize laureate T. S. Eliot in 1955, 1958 and 1960.
In total, the Nobel committee received 70 nominations including nominations for 58 authors, including Ivo Andrià(awarded in 1961), John Steinbeck (awarded in 1962), Jean-Paul Sartre (awarded in 1964), Robert Frost, André Malraux, Romulo Gallegos, Aldous Huxley, Louis Aragon, Johan Falkberget, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Alberto Moravia, Ignazio Silone, Ezra Pound, Julien Gracq, E. M. Forster, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Junichiro Tanizaki, Miguel Torga and Tarjei Vesaas. Fourteen of the nominees were newly nominated namely Heinrich Böll (awarded in 1972), Wesley LaViolette, Aquilino Ribeiro, Marie Noël, Jean Price-Mars, James Thurber, Franz Theodor Csokor, Stratis Myrivilis, Elias Venezis, Aksel Sandemose, John Boyton Priestley and René Char. There were only four women nominated namely Maria Dàbrowska, Marie Noël, Juana de Ibarbourou and Karen Blixen.
The authors Sibilla Aleramo, Vicki Baum, Ya'akov Cahan, Ralph Chubb, Hjalmar Dahl, Harold Lenoir Davis, Leonora Eyles, Paul Fort, Ethel Voynich, Ferdynand Goetel, Sigurd Hoel, Zora Neale Hurston, Raïssa Maritain, John P. Marquand, Elsie J. Oxenham, Pierre Reverdy, Nevil Shute, Tetsuro Watsuji and Richard Wright died in 1960 without having been nominated for the prize.
The main contenders for the 1960 Nobel Prize in Literature were Saint-John Perse, who had been nominated by the 1948 Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, and the Yugoslavian author Ivo AndriÃÂ. The members of the Nobel committee were divided between the candidates. Committee chairman Anders ÃÂsterling and Sigfrid Siwertz supported a prize to Ivo AndriÃÂ, while Eyvind Johnson and Henry Olsson advocated a prize to Saint-John Perse. ÃÂsterling found Perse a worthy candidate but a too esoteric poet with "a resonance that is too limited to be appropriately made the subject of a global award such as the Nobel Prize." Olsson, on the other hand, in comparing the two candidates, found that Perse in almost every aspect appeared "as AndriÃÂ's opposite and is as global as the other is regional". Olsson and Johnson also argued that Perse was well known and widely acknowledged as a great poet. ÃÂsterling unsuccessfully argued for a prize to Ivo AndriÃÂ, noting the Yugoslav author's "mastered style" that would open "a previously unknown page in the world chronicle and appeals to us from the depths of the tormented national soul", adding that a prize to Andriàwould also have the advantage of correcting "the justified criticism of the geographical distribution of the Nobel Prize in Literature.â Andriàwas subsequently awarded the prize the following year.
At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 1960, Anders ÃÂsterling, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said: