/lit/ - Literature

It would seem since the second world war literature has petered off as a legitimate profession. Strange as there are more people in the world now than ever before, yet since at latest the 1980s hardly any great literature has emerged from the West, and what did come from the likes of McCarthy and the postmodernists has generally been niche. Is it because of the massive shift to democratic capitalism in the wake of WW2, where careers that earn more money are valued above all else? Or is it because the shift to postmodernism isolated writers from the general populace? I think its very peculiar that of the most acclaimed living authors, almost all of them are over 65, and even they are for the most part not widely known. In the first half of the 20th century authors such as Hemingway, Huxley, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, TS Eliott, etc were household names before the age of 40. What changed this?

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