SOURCE: “Sir Winston Churchill: Nobel Prize Winner,” in The Saturday Review, Vol. 36, No. 44, October 31, 1953, pp. 22-23.

In the following essay, Morrison discusses reasons why Churchill deserves his Nobel Prize for literature.

The entire historical profession is honored in the honor to Sir Winston; for it is the first time in half a century that an historian has won the Nobel Prize for Literature; in 1902 it was bestowed on Theodor Mommsen. Restricted as this prize is to “literature of an idealist tendency,” few historians would even qualify, since few are able to apply “idealist” tendencies to the past. Even if we define “idealist” as synonymous with “creative,” what historians might have won the prize—assuming, of course, that the prize had always existed? Herodotus certainly, and Thucydides. Gibbon would have rated, and Macaulay, and Lord Clarendon, the Winston Churchill of Charles the Second's day. Our own Parkman and Prescott...