威廉·福克納 / William Faulkner
威廉·福克納（1897—1962），1949年諾貝爾文學獎得主。其文以人物心理的細微刻畫及複雜迂回的形式結構見勝。因其兩度獲普利策獎，而贏得“美國偉大小說家”的美譽。本文是他獲得諾貝爾獎時發表的著名演說，文中勉勵作家必須提升自己的心靈，時時以愛、憐憫與犧牲來喚醒人類亙古的真理。
Pre-reading Activity
Read this article with the questions below, and answer them respectively.
1.According to the author, who or what should be awarded by this prize? Why?
2.What subjects are worth writing about by young men and women?
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work—a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.So this award is only mine in trust.It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin.But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.There are no longer problems of the spirit.There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again.He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed —love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.