Last Thursday, the Swedish Academy announced that the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was the Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, immediately disappointing every writer not named Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio and prompting the standard complaints from fans of authors with names like Roth and Updike. Yet, lost in the usual Nobel drama was a larger, stranger and nearly unexplainable fact: While American fiction and theater can boast of at least a few Nobel winners (nine, to be precise), no American poet has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not one, in more than 100 years.