American poet Louise Glück became the 16th woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fourth Jewish woman to win the prize, following Nelly Sachs (1966), Nadine Gordimer (1991) and Elfriede Jelinek (2004), and the first American Jewish woman to win. The prize has been awarded since 1901.

In a 2012 review of Glück’s collected poems, New Yorker critic Dan Chiasson wrote that “Outside her poems, much noisy history has occurred this past half century. Inside them, you find, X-rayed by an unusually analytic mind, only the kinds of things that Emerson once said a poet needed: ‘Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions.’”