awarded to Milton Friedman "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilisation policy". The award caused international protests because of Friedman's association with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. During March 1975, Friedman visited Chile and gave lectures on inflation, meeting with Pinochet and other government officials. Literature The Nobel Prize in Literature has a history of controversial awards. Many major authors have been ignored by the Nobel Committee, possibly for political or other extra-literary reasons, including Irishman James Joyce, Frenchman Marcel Proust, Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges and Americans Henry James, W. H. Auden, Philip Roth, and John Updike. Joseph Epstein, writing in the Wall Street Journal, noted: "You may not know it, but you and I are members of a club whose fellow members include Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. The club is the Non-Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature. All these authentically great writers, still alive when the prize, initiated in 1901, was being awarded, didn't win it." This led him to speculate that "Criteria other than high art seem to be involved." From 1901 to 1912, the committee's work reflected an interpretation of the "ideal direction" stated in Nobel's will as "a lofty and sound idealism", which caused Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola and Mark Twain to be rejected. Sweden's historic antipathy towards Russia was cited as the reason neither Tolstoy nor Anton Chekhov took the prize. During World War I and its immediate aftermath, the committee adopted a policy of neutrality, favouring writers from non-combatant countries. Another notable omission for the prize is R. K. Narayan, an Indian writer known for his works set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi and for abridged versions of the Indian epics – The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. Despite being nominated and shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times, Narayan never won the honour. In the 1960s, Graham Greene, who took it upon himself to work as Narayan's agent for his works, expressed confidence that Narayan would one day win the Nobel Prize. Agreeing with Greene's views, Jeffrey Archer more recently echoed the view that R. K. Narayan should have indeed won the Nobel Prize. One of the jokes in literary circles was