“The Swedish industrialist said he wanted the prize to recognize ‘the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.'” That direction has changed several times over the past 116 years, having gone to writers as wildly different as Sigmund Freud, Winston Churchill, Pearl S. Buck, Rabindranath Tagore, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Samuel Beckett, Gabriel García Marquez, Doris Lessing, and Bob Dylan. Jim Heintz looks at what directions that ideal might be heading in this year.