I read in Writers Almanac that when Sinclair Lewis won a Nobel Prize in literature, he used his speech “to talk about all the other writers that might have been chosen: Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O'Neill, and Willa Cather, and he ended the lecture by mentioning the younger writers he considered the future of American literature, including Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, each of whom had just published his first few books. Lewis said, "[These] young Americans ... are doing such passionate and authentic work that it makes me sick to see that I am a little too old to be one of them."”