/lit/ - Literature

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once (apocryphally) said "if in the future I am only known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, I have failed"

watched that movie yesterday and decided to get my bowl cut redone

Faulkner thought The Sound and The Fury was a failure.

Thomas Wolfe thought Web and the Rock was his best work. But if you were to poll the English departments of every Division 1A university in the US, everyone would claim Look Homeward, Angel, and about five people would have read Web.

>>6990498
Not entirely, he just rewrote it a few times and said it never lived up to his personal standard, in which case everything he did was a failure because he sought to always best himself at everything he wrote.

>>6990489
The Lost World is god-tier, so at least he didn't completely fail

>>6990492
>hipstered hipsterday and hipstered to hipster hipsterdom

>>6992147
I thought he called it a "wonderful failure" or something

Finnegans Wake is probably the biggest. Spending your final 17 years to write and mostly just negative feedback telling you that you wasted your time.

But perhaps he wrote it for the one person who will get it kind of like Nietzsche and the Ubermensch

>>6990465

Obligatory "Melville died in obscurity" post.

When Moby-Dick was released no one liked it or knew what the fuck to make of it. Half of America hated it because of its open mocking of Puritan/American Protestant values. Melville never recovered as a (financially) successful writer in his lifetime and died a few years after working at a shitty customs job for a while. By 1876, none of his books were still in print, which means that when he died in 1891 none of his works had been published for 15 years of his life.

Meanwhile, John Green is raking in millions.

This shit infuriates me.

>>6992185
>Ubermensch
That's me. I'm one of that.

>>6990498
he would have been even more disappointed if he could see his legacy today

>>6992200
Fucking Franco has made shitty As I Lay Dying, Sound and the Fury, and Children of God adaptations. Somebody stop him.

Mishimas aesthetic death didn't go so well with the public as he probably would have hoped.

>>6992226
Child of God wasn't that bad. Putting his face on the cover when he played an insignificant character was such a dumb ego move though.

Isaac Newton not being recognized for his tremendous contributions to alchemy.

>>6992237
I saw the movie they made about Mishima last night. Didnt seem to go over well at all.

>>6992237
I don't think he was expecting to be successful with his coup d'état. Mishima laments Japan's "decay" in his tetralogy but he also seems to suggest that it is irreversible.
It was more of an excuse to make a big spectacle of his death.

>>6992267
Tbh I always figured the suicide was a pure ego/attention thing

>>6992200
The biggest joke on that poster is "Seth Rogan and Danny McBride"

>>6992275
muh pure japanese honor though

>>6992463
Honour is pure ego.

>>6992226
He also starred in a movie adaption of Tristan and Isolde which left the production company fucking bankrupt!

James Joyce thought Finnegans Wake was his masterwork
it's pure gibberish.

>>6992470

>>6990492
>I watched the worst movie about joan of arc and like it.

Literally fuck off pleb.

>>6994139
I liked the haircuts

I think that's very often the case with writers

>>6990465
Is that Dylann?

>>6994168
It's actually a common joke among writers. Their favorite workers are rarely the most critically acclaimed or best selling.

>>6992185
Didn't he write it with his mentally insane daughter in mind ?
>>6990465
Slightly different, but Goethe thought his most significant accomplishment was his work on light, and that over time it would come to dwarf his literary output in the eyes of posterity.


Also, Poe said in a letter to a friend: "now that I have written Eureka, I can die in peace". I think the Raven alone shadows Eureka in terms of popularity and fame, despite being rather secondary in Poe's eye.

Incidentally I recommend reading Eureka. It will deeply surprise those who think Poe was merely a "le spooky Victorian horror story/purple poem" writer.

>>6992241
kek

>>6992226

Don't forget his fucking Hart Crane movie!

>>6992187
Yeah, I read that his initial fanbase felt alienated after Moby-Dick was published, and it ironically caused his downfall.

Take solace in the fact that nobody will remember John Green in a hundred years beyond being "that youtube activist cuck." Melville is sticking around.

Thomas Mann's proudest acheivement was the four volume epic biblical retelling "Joseph And His Brothers" which no one read, ever. Hell, no one even reads Magic Mountain anymore, they definitely ain't reading that shit! I have a copy of it, and I want to read it just as a display of willpower to wade through long boring shit, but I never get around to it.

>>6990492
fuck, i've been growing my hair all summer hoping to come back to campus rocking a man bun, but i may have to go full bowl on mother fuckers this fall!

>>6994271
>man bun
end yourself

>>6992322
>its real
I thought it was just going to be some comedy skit with seth rogen and danny mcbride
what the fuugg

>>6994271
>>6990492
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Ub55qx2wQ

>>6994271
>man bun

>>6994271
redirect yourself to the nearest suicide booth

>>6994285
Is that what they're calling it?
I thought sure it was a weeb/Avatar thing and they'd call it a topknot.
At least men aren't doing the quarter moon butt shorts
/fa

Nietzsche regarded The Gay Science as his most "personal" book, yet it's hardly read today.

>>6994205
But the chromatic scale that he developed actually sees use by artists because of the whole concept of temperamental and complimentary colors etc., to at least give him some credit.
Also I know a guy who went to a Rudolf Steiner/Waldorf school and they're supposedly nuts for esoteric stuff like that which I guess doesn't surprise me.

>>6994145
It's fine, they just don't know /fa/ anon.

>>6995338
Fun Schopenfact: Schopenhauer was so envious of Goethe's reputation as a polymath supergenius that he, Schopenhauer, made his own color theory and released it at nearly the same time to undercut Goethe.

>>6992267
I don't know if he thought it was irreversible but he hoped it would live on as National myth to inspire future generations as teh May 15th incident did for Mishima. This can be compared to the Easter Uprising in Ireland 1916, the Irish rebels launched a futile occupation of Dublin city centre that was roundly unpopula, but after the leaders were executed, romantic nationalism rose tremendously in sympathy that resulted in the war of independence

>>6992241
his Emerald Tablet is bretty gud

>>6994471

In academia at least, its interesting that he regarded Zarathustra as his most important work, but the Genealogy is his most studied.

>>6995533
I could not get a chapter into Beyond Good and Evil but I guess if he says the same thing like a mystic in Zarathustra I can glide right through it.