Still more surprisingly, it was that rarest of birds: a work of lasting genius from a mid-70s white funk band.
Since a Nobel Prize, unlike an American Award, is not a recognition of immediate achievement, but of lasting genius in a specific field of study, the fact that dozens of Nobels have been won by Californians over the years is especially impressive.
But it created a big splash last year when it sold 700,000 copies of Ray Charles's last album, "Genius Loves Company".
Rescued at last, her genius soars.
To me, he seems at least as significant a figure as Henri Rousseau, who was the first and — it turned out — last unschooled genius to win undisputed membership in the canon of twentieth-century art.
Mr. Howard, 48, who worked with Mr. Charles for two decades and won three Grammys for his work on his last album, "Genius Loves Company," had been charged with grand theft by embezzlement and receiving stolen property.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 1716) was one of the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is known as the last "universal genius".
The cyberutopians told us the Web would flatten artificial hierarchies, tear down the wall between experts and the rest of us, unchain at last the genius that lurked in the common man.
Chaadaev ("Philosophical Letters"), V. S. Solovyev ("L'idée russe"), N. A. Berdyaev ("Russia's Fate"), A. M. Maslennikov ("The Ideology of The Imperial Power in Russia"), L. P. Karsavin ("East, West and the Russian Idea"), Serafim (Sobolev) ("Russian Ideology") and, finally, the last Russian genius, A. I. Solzhenitsyn ("How Are We to Improve Russia), among others.
