The first Nobel Prize in Literature went to a would-be engineer turned poet
When the Swedish Academy handed out its first literature prize in 1901, it chose Sully Prudhomme, a melancholy Parisian who had trained for engineering and dreamed of writing scientific verse for modern times. He promptly gave most of the money away to fund a poetry prize of his own.
René François Armand Prudhomme was born in Paris on 16 March 1839. His parents had waited ten years to marry until they could afford it, and his father, a shopkeeper, died when the boy was two, so mother and son moved in with an uncle. He later fused his father's name, Sully, onto his own surname. At school he loved classics and mathematics, flirted with joining the Dominicans, and studied at the Lycée Bonaparte until eye trouble cut that short. Jobs at the Schneider steel foundry in the Creusot region and in a notary's office followed.
Encouragement from a student society launched his writing career. His debut collection of 1865, Stances et Poèmes, won praise from the critic Sainte-Beuve and contained Le vase brisé, still his best-known poem. The Franco-Prussian War then wrecked his health for good; he wrote about it in two books in the early 1870s. Over time he left the sentimental tone of his early work behind, blending the polished form of the Parnassian poets with scientific and philosophical themes. Lucretius was a model, and he put the first book of De rerum natura into French verse.
Big philosophical poems followed, La Justice in 1878 and Le Bonheur in 1888, though critics tend to feel their spare style weakened them as poetry without making them convincing as philosophy. After that he turned to essays on aesthetics, verse technique, Pascal and free will. Honours came steadily: a seat in the Académie française in 1881 and the Légion d'honneur in 1895.
The Nobel citation praised his lofty idealism and the union of heart and intellect in his work. In 1902 he co-founded the Société des poètes français. His last years were spent almost in seclusion at Châtenay-Malabry, weakened by bouts of paralysis yet still writing, until his sudden death on 6 September 1907. He lies in Père-Lachaise.
Source: Sully Prudhomme
