/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22913874]

Who are some writers that have been largely forgotten or faced a decline in reputation?

[Anonymous No.22913883]

>>22913874
In decline: Theodore Dreiser, Dos Passos,

[Anonymous No.22913901]

Gore Vidal

[Anonymous No.22913932]

Erskine Caldwell is effectively forgotten. The only time he will be brought up is if you ask for Southern fiction recommendations, but you'll have to say you've read all the usual suggestions before he gets brought up. As an example
>>I read Faulkner and want more Southern Fiction like this
>/lit/ recommends:
>1. The rest of Faulkner
>2. Cormac McCarthy
>3. Flannery O'Connor
>4. Carson McCullers
>5. Truman Capote
>6. Dorothy Allison
>7. Toni Morrison
>8. Breece D'J Pancake
>9. Thomas Wolfe
>10. Walker Percy
>11. The guy who wrote Deliverance
>12. Eudora Welty
>13. Erskine Caldwell
As you can see he is at the bottom of the list and unlucky number 13.

[Anonymous No.22913958]

>>22913932
Thanks for the recs anon

[Anonymous No.22913964]

>>22913901
Most of the writers mentioned in OP are not worth reading. The author is about as insightful as the untranslated: meaning, nonexistent profundity. Literally just superficial plot summary and wikipedia-tier biographical details.

[Anonymous No.22914006]

>>22913958
The author's I listed are ranked by obscurity/how often they're referenced by /lit/. Doesn't mean the lower ranked authors are bad. If you really like Faulkner, you need to read Thomas Wolfe's first two books.
>Look Homeward, Angel
>Of Time and the River
Look Homeward, Angle is a masterpiece. Of Time and the River is almost as good, but it loses at lot due to its length. His second novel isn't as focused as his first, but it's still very immersive writing. I haven't read past his first two novels, but I own some of them. It gets weird after the first two novels because Wolfe abandons his original project and begins to rewrite it from scratch with his third novel. Plus everything after his second novel is a posthumous publication.

[Anonymous No.22914012]

>>22914006
You’re a moron

[Anonymous No.22914024]

>>22914012
Well, fuck you.

[Anonymous No.22914030]

Nicholas Monsarrat was quite famous while alive and is now really only known for The Cruel Sea

[Anonymous No.22914032]

>>22913874
Bernard Shaw is apparently considered Britain's best playwright after Shakespeare but I never see anyone talk about his plays or read them aside from Pygmalion. I never see any film adaptations either. And his political beliefs are so hilariously obsolete that even in his own time everyone thought he was a fucking idiot. Many contemporaries thought he was a fraud. I suppose they’ve been proven correct.
>In 1921 Shaw's erstwhile collaborator William Archer, in a letter to the playwright, wrote: "I doubt if there is any case of a man so widely read, heard, seen, and known as yourself, who has produced so little effect on his generation."

[Anonymous No.22914033]

>>22914006
> Look Homeward, Angel
Thoughts on O Lost?

[Anonymous No.22914036]

>>22913874
Maeve Brennan, once seen as a true NYC socialite loved by all, forgotten when she had nothing left to give anymore.
Her usage of the English language is wonderful.

[Anonymous No.22914037]

>>22914033
I haven't read it, but I would be interested to. Although I imagine it suffers from bloat much like Of Time and the River.

[Anonymous No.22914065]

>>22914036
>In the 1970s Brennan became paranoid and alcoholic. Hospitalized on numerous occasions, she became destitute and homeless, frequently sleeping in the women's lavatory at The New Yorker. She was last seen at the magazine's offices in 1981.[citation needed]
>In the 1980s, Brennan vanished from view and her work was forgotten. After wandering from one transient hotel to another along 42nd Street, she was admitted to Lawrence Nursing Home in Arverne.
This shit is depressing. To be an admired, sincere artist, then to have such a miserable decline, and then to be forgotten with no remembrance of you aside from the handful of readers who still care about your work.

[Anonymous No.22914080]

>>22913874
Tons of 20th century American writers: Dreiser, Tarkington, Lewis, Sinclair, Yates, Updike, Vidal, Mailer, Cheever…I find the phenomenon interesting for some reason. I think the society that some of those novelist depicted has fallen out of favor with modern audiences. Howells is another. Anderson’s star has faded too but he has a cult following of sorts

[Anonymous No.22914101]

>>22914080
All realists… also add Bellow to the list. Realism is extremely forgettable

[Anonymous No.22914110]

All writers are utterly forgotten in the long haul. An appreciation of this fact within one's bones is required to write or think intelligently. Humanity is not likely to survive another five centuries

[Anonymous No.22914129]

>>22914065
Such a jolly girl before too. Such an adventurous soul. Only recently have people began appreciating her more again. Her NYTimes stories are super fun.

[Anonymous No.22914138]

>>22913964
You are a miserable jackass. Gore Vidal was a genius and a gift to America, probably the best thinker of the 60s era.

Few could ever rival his heavy adolescent reading or his adult independence of mind. Few ever managed to describe the authorities so well.

Even his synopses, as of Suetonius, are very useful especially in 2024. He had a piercing eye for personality.

[Anonymous No.22914225]

Edgar Saltus

[Anonymous No.22914231]

>>22913874
Stefan Zweig. Probably the biggest author writing in Europe at one point but now he's virtually unknown, outside perhaps his short story The Royal Game.

[Anonymous No.22914233]

>>22914231
The hipster from lit twitter like him, I think

[Anonymous No.22914237]

>>22914225
One of my favorite writers had name dropped The Imperial Purple a few times. You ever read it?

[Anonymous No.22914243]

>>22914032
He was also a male feminist

[Anonymous No.22914258]

>>22913874
>Hall Caine was an enormously popular and best-selling author in his time. Crowds would gather outside his houses hoping to get a glimpse of him.
>"The Eternal City" is the first novel to have sold over a million copies worldwide.
>Most of Caine's novels were adapted into silent black and white films.
>He was "accorded the adulation reserved now for pop stars and footballers", and yet he is now virtually unknown.

[Anonymous No.22914263]

William Howells wrote extremely beautiful prose that was well regarded at the turn of the century, then dissapeared forever. It is heartbreaking. His writing is extremely beautiful, even Mark Twain bowed to him.

Thackery was huge mid 19th century and has also dissapeared.

[Anonymous No.22914267]

>>22914258
His Wikipedia page is lengthy as fuck. Yet I have never heard of him until now. Grim.
>Hall Caine was an enormously popular and best-selling author in his time. Crowds would gather outside his houses hoping to get a glimpse of him. He was "accorded the adulation reserved now for pop stars and footballers", and yet today is virtually unknown.

[Anonymous No.22914271]

>>22914263
Thackery hasn’t disappeared. Vanity Fair is still in print, still read, and still adapted.

[Anonymous No.22914282]

>>22914110
stfu jew

[Anonymous No.22914289]

>>22914258
This is fucking grim. His novels sold millions of copies and yet The Eternal City only has 66 ratings on Goodreads. Most other "forgotten" writers mentioned in this thread still tower above this guy. And he was more famous than all of them, possibly combined. How does such a decline in reputation even happen?

[Anonymous No.22914292]

>>22914289
I mean holy fuck, these are the contemporary reactions to his novel The Master of Man
>Quotes from the press reaction to the novel, included in later editions of the book, were remarkable for drawing comparisons between Caine and Tolstoy

>"A great novel. Will stand as the English Anna Karenina." (The Daily Graphic)
>"Sir Hall Caine in The Master of Man has shown himself to be the English Tolstoy." (J. Cuming Walters in the Manchester City News)
>"It places him to the same rank, as a great world novelist, with Zola, Hugo and Tolstoy." (Leeds Mercury)

[Anonymous No.22914299]

Even writing good books is not enough. Fate and luck play a part as well when it comes to being remembered. This is why the concept of a “Western canon” is kind of silly. Many works have survived arbitrarily, not necessarily because pf literary merit.

[Anonymous No.22914304]

The early English novels. I hear people talking about Tristram Shandy in the context of Schopenhauer ig, but do people read it? Maybe people read Robinson Crusoe, but does anyone care about Samuel Richardson? bc Clarissa and Pamela are based

like how you gonna bother reading The Tale of Genji but not these

[Anonymous No.22914310]

Donoghue says Updike, Mailer, Roth are hacks and they will soon be forgotten
https://youtu.be/FQ5GVEI2OY0?si=kKWRMjIVKwksG-TH&t=846

[Anonymous No.22914313]

>>22914304
I read TS a while back. I'm a big fan of DQ and heard that it was a spiritual successor. I understand why it was a success in its day, and much of the humor still holds up, but by the end, I lacked the sense of awe DQ left me with. I'm glad to have read it, but for me it's more an interesting object of study than a complete experience in itself.

[Anonymous No.22914316]

>>22914304

I don't disagree but I think the real problem is the reverse — i.e. instead of a lot of bad stuff making into the canon, a lot of good stuff doesn't make it.

[Anonymous No.22914320]

>>22914310
p sure Paglia hates Chaucer :(

[Anonymous No.22914324]

>>22914231
He is actually popular in Turkey, which has a very strong literary culture and honors Western authors more than Western countries themselves do. His memoir The World of Yesterday is common to find in most bookstores. But yeah outside of that he is usually ignored.

>>22914299
Agree, there are a lot of factors that determine which writers get remembered or not and they're hard to predict. Very few authors ever willed themselves into becoming legends. Tolstoy is an anomaly in modern times. And because of what you say, it's true that what we define as a coherent "canon" of novels is pretty arbitrary. Much of it is just pure chance and academic consensus.

[Anonymous No.22914346]

>More than 25 years after his death, "The Stories of John Cheever" sells only about 5,000 copies a year in the US; "Falconer" and "The Wapshot Chronicle" have long struggled to stay in print at all.
Am I the only one who still cares about this ol' homo?

[Anonymous No.22914352]

>>22914346
> The Stories of John Cheever
I almost bought that book. Is it as good as they say?

[Anonymous No.22914357]

>>22914299
I agree there is some luck, often dependent on times outside of one’s control, but there will always be a core of influential writers, aka the western canon. No one can change the influence that people like Homer, Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare had. Too much has radiated from them which in turn influences more writers

[Anonymous No.22914363]

>>22914346
My father had an affair with him that came to light after my sister’s friends accidentally burned down our cabin. All was destroyed but the love letters between Cheever and my father. It was awkward

[Anonymous No.22914365]

>medieval works are still in print and read
>some middle aged Anglo Jew’s post WW2 ramblings will be forgotten in our lifetimes
Justice is lovely

[Anonymous No.22914376]

>>22913874
Carlyle probably had the biggest fall from grace. People in his time literally predicted that he would never be forgotten and would perennially be a source of wisdom. He was called a prophet. You cannot find a single writer from his era that didn’t at least respect him or evaluate his ideas. Goethe, Wagner, Eliot, Marx, Engels, Dickens, Ruskin, Nietzsche, etc. And today he is mostly obscure and reviled. In my opinion though this has more to do with academic suppression. Carlyle is simply too reactionary and outside the fold of modern politics for him to be a respected voice. His body of work has many problems but his central writings like Past & Present and the Latter-day Pamphlets are still brilliant and highly influential. He was instrumental in forming the basis of socialist and welfare policies in the world today just like Ruskin (also largely forgotten for the same reasons) and Charles Dickens.

[Anonymous No.22914386]

>>22914376
I read that anecdote about how he wrote The French Revolution and then sent the manuscript to the publisher/ another writer and their maid mistook it for trash and burned it. Carlyle had to rewrite the entire book by memory lol

[Anonymous No.22914391]

>>22914352
Yes. It's consistently good and often great. At first I was expecting some "grounded" drama literature, but Cheever also flirted with genres like parody and magic realism, and his writing style is really smooth.

[Anonymous No.22914394]

>>22913874
In my post I forgot to mention O Henry.

[Anonymous No.22914437]

>>22914376
>Targets for his ire included the French, the Irish, Slavs, Turks, Americans, Catholics, and, most explicitly, blacks and Jews.
He would love /pol/, I guess.

[Anonymous No.22914443]

>>22913932
>largely forgotten
James Dickey
As exhibit A I submit your own list of forgotten authors

[Anonymous No.22914556]

>>22913874
Is Anatole France still read in France? I’ve seen different writers from the period saying they liked him and he won the Nobel but it seems his popularity is not what it used to be.

[Anonymous No.22914557]

>>22914437
No wonder he’s forgotten.

[Anonymous No.22914561]

>>22914036
I read the long winded woman and it was great

Although not entirely forgotten Ivy Compton-Burnett used to be spoken of in the same breath as Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf (who respected her and considered her a serious competitor) and now is only known by a small cult of fans. I think she might be getting a bit of a resurgence thanks to NYRB but I doubt anyone on this board other than myself has read her, for example, and most probably haven't even heard of her

[Anonymous No.22914573]

>>22914065
>feeling bad for women
Haha. No.

[Anonymous No.22914585]

>>22914080
1. Americans are fat retards who don’t read
2. The American state does nothing to promote its literary culture aside from assign Twain in public schools

[Anonymous No.22914586]

>>22914556
>he won the Nobel
Actually, now that I think of it, what OP asked perfectly describes most Nobel prize winners

[Anonymous No.22914598]

>>22914386
Stuart Mill put him up to it too, he also complained that the original manuscript was tenfolds better that what he managed later

[Anonymous No.22914601]

>>22914006
Based Thomas Wolfe reader. Wolfe isn't perfect or among the greatest but I personally think his reputation is unjust and he had his considerable merits.

[Anonymous No.22914611]

>>22914032
I'm from ..well never mind and Bernard Shaw was huge here until recently. Browsing /lit/ and other forums did surprise me because I'd never see him mentioned other than to be maligned for his politics.

[Anonymous No.22914613]

>forgotten

You mean 'boring'

[Anonymous No.22914619]

Can we talk about pulp fiction? Lovecraft, Howard, Smith, are still read today but which ones didn’t make the cut (that you’re aware of)?

[Anonymous No.22914626]

>>22914619
Seconded, I want to see some Lovecraft imitators, I bet (unlike most of this academic midwit shit) that's actually interesting

[Anonymous No.22914650]

>>22914611
>recently
Toronto? I'm not Canadian btw

[Anonymous No.22914759]

I propose Robert Louis Stevenson and Arnold Bennett. Both were the victims of that vindictive, jealous dyke Virginia Woolfe. RL Stevenson's reputation was almost destroyed because of the secret campaigns led by her clique and if it were not for his modern champions like Nabokov and others, he'd be just another hack for posers here. Arnold Bennett, on the other hand, was a contemporary of Woolf and wrote some masterful realistic literature that was loved by the masses and yet suffered from that sort of academic psyops. Now everyone here knows of RL Stevenson but Bennett is actually good and should be read if you still value competent storytelling and great literature in general.

[Anonymous No.22914780]

>>22914036
>>22914065
Apparently it's her birthday today! Here's a nice New Yorker article on Brennan and some interesting rising in her in early '10s. Which didn't ensure of course.. But she was something back in her day. New Yorker editor William Maxwell said "To be around [Brennan] was to see style invented."
>https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-maeve-brennan-revival

[Anonymous No.22914797]

Actual thread on literature on my /lit/ ?

[Anonymous No.22915089]

>>22914619
He was the first american professional novelist and wrote pulpy gothics that heavily influenced american literature. This is your precursor to pulp.

[Anonymous No.22915099]

>>22914258
>>22914289
has anyone on here read it? Is it any good? I might pick it up after I've finished what I'm currently reading, but it seems there are two radically different versions of the text floating around.

[Anonymous No.22915134]

>>22914231
He´s had a massive resurgence in popularity since 2010, at least in Europe. You must be completely out of the loop, a zoomer, or maybe he´s not as popular in the US, but I doubt it, because Wes Anderson was namedropping him in the Grand Budapest Hotel.

[Anonymous No.22915286]

>>22914561
Evelyn Waugh is a man btw. You seem to be implying he is a woman with your post.

[Anonymous No.22915290]

>>22914231
Good. Zweig should be forgotten. He is a YA chick-lit author. You should be ashamed as a man for enjoying his work and thinking he is a worthy author. He is literally the John Green or Colleen Hoover of his time. Shame on you, tranny.

[Anonymous No.22915428]

>>22915290
NTA but :(

[Anonymous No.22915590]

>>22915286
I didn't intend to imply that. I was just naming contemporary authors of a similar caliber she used to be spoken of in the same breath as who have remained popular whilst she became increasingly unknown

[Anonymous No.22915596]

>>22915590
this quote aged particularly well lol

[Barkun No.22915602]

>>22915596
I can't think retard. Let me put it bluntly. This way is impalable. Another way by stumbling on data is possible.

[Barkun No.22915605]

>>22915602
I know if I'm able to use my mind(not employ it as with this way), it garners quadrillions in promiscuity.

It's like holding a powerful tech, and that's it, cause I can't think.

[Barkun No.22915610]

>>22915605
It's like 'no think' repeating continuum. I know you thinks that's impossible but trust I am captured by overarching word.

[Anonymous No.22915638]

>>22914394
He's popular among ESL students learning English. I brought a copy of his short stories to a graduate math class once, and three different Chinese women asked to take a picture with it. Apparently they teach "The Gift of the Magi" to young people who go abroad to America or the UK.

[Anonymous No.22915671]

>>22915638
Interesting

>I brought a copy of his short stories to a graduate math class once, and three different Chinese women asked to take a picture with it

Wut?

[Barkun No.22915678]

>>22915671
Something is the supermassive Sun in my dimension. You might be breaking it somewhere and it could be obvious to you. It's also causing a massive error.

[Anonymous No.22915679]

>>22915671
They wanted to take a selfie with me while I held the book, to show off to their friends back home that Americans really did read O Henry.

[Anonymous No.22915719]

>>22913874
>William Gilmore Simms
A very popular and highly influential southern poet/novelist in his time, but his works faded into obscurity after the civil war for the obvious reasons. Edgar Allan Poe's favorite American author.
>Martin Farquhar Tupper
The best selling poet in North American and Britain for a time, but his popularity lead to him being derided and attacked by contrarian critics, and a bunch of people started making parodies of his Proverbial Philosophy. His style influenced Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson heavily.

[Anonymous No.22916158]

>>22914586
Very true. When I read the list of Nobel Prize winners for literature I have no idea who most of them are.

[Anonymous No.22917076]

>>22915290
The John Green of his time is still a masterful writer compared to today's John Greens

[Anonymous No.22917239]

>>22914363
shit
that could be the base for a great short story or novella
I hope some fucker here uses this

[Anonymous No.22917247]

>>22914346
i read falconer last year, it was good

[Anonymous No.22917304]

>>22914138
>>22914080

Vidal shined as a political essayist and that kind of stuff obviously dates very quickly and is forgotten. His other works were just entertainment, not literature.

[Anonymous No.22917307]

>>22917239

[Anonymous No.22917311]

>>22915286
>>22915590

How do we pronounce Evelyn anyway? Is it EVE... or EV... ?

I know Lord Evelyn pronounced it EVE, but Evelyn in the US is typically pronouced EV. Just wondering...

[Anonymous No.22917383]

>>22917311
Evva linn

[Anonymous No.22917507]

>>22913874
Herbert Spencer used to be absolutely huge

[Anonymous No.22918057]

Calder Willingham
Chandler Brossard
Irwin Shaw

[Anonymous No.22918100]

>>22914573
go fuck yourself, anon

[Anonymous No.22918181]

>>22914310
You can already see swathes of acclaimed American writers falling out of prominence. Mailer was the first to go, probably just because he died first. I'm surprised that Henry Miller lasted into the 80s and 90s, but he's definitely died a slow death.

Ultimately, popularity is usually a terrible gauge of quality, especially when you have universal literacy.

[Anonymous No.22918185]

>>22913874
Kate Chopin

[Anonymous No.22918187]

>>22918181
So what makes an author fondly remembered and "canonized?" Academic consensus? Promotion from publishing companies? Popularity from readers?

[Anonymous No.22918204]

>>22918187
Nta but I think it is largely unpredictable. A writer may be a nobody in his life but since he touched on themes or ideas that became pertinent to later cultures or readers, he is resurrected from the ashes. Sometimes it’s the other way. Sometimes a few industry people or writers bring fame to a figure who shouldn’t have it. Sometimes those people champion someone deserving. Some of my favorite writers are those fading stars and though it makes me sad that the vast reading public will never see what I see in such figures, I will always take solace in the fact that they mean something special to me, and no amount of popularity or lack there of will take it away

[Anonymous No.22918244]

>>22913874
I’d also like to throw Ford Maddox Ford into the bay. A giant in the industry in a couple ways, now mainly known as a curiosity through other writers he had connections to

I love Dos Passos and DH Lawrence but they are clearly on the wane. Ultimately not many writers will reach legendary status. For every 2 dozen great writers, only 1 is immortalized and the rest become niche. Such is literature. Popularity decades or centuries later doesn’t necessarily mean a writer was bad or good. Fame is a fickle woman

[Anonymous No.22918253]

>>22918244
Lawrence will exist for more decades because of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. They made a netflix movie just last year.

[Anonymous No.22918257]

>>22915290
Fuck you, I know he's a Jew but he's still enjoyable. His books are worth something, unlike that hack Green or any other pop author today.

[Anonymous No.22918315]

>>22918253
Yeah, I think him and Henry Miller will always exist to some degree because of the controversy surrounding them and their trailblazing books. I just bet more people know about the obscenity trials than have actually read them, which is a shame because they are way more than smut, barely smut if anything, and both have larger focuses than pornographic sex

[Anonymous No.22918322]

>>22914759
>Bennett is actually good and should be read if you still value competent storytelling and great literature in general
One thing to say here: The Grand Babylon Hotel, lmao

[Anonymous No.22918341]

>>22913874
After thinking for a few minutes, I think the 1920’s and 30’s was a prosperous time for literature, post war and pre depression, depression, the Paris scene, all that stuff…it created a glut of fine books and authors but history just isn’t going to remember all of them, it has a way of culling the herd which isn’t necessarily deserving of being culled. It was probably the high water mark of literary output before other forms of entertainment took over

[Anonymous No.22918350]

Hamlin Garland
Terry Southern
Brautigan is in decline
Tom Robbins isn't talked about much

[Anonymous No.22918353]

>>22914611
Shaw was definitely never “huge” on here. I would say someone like Dostoevsky or Nietzsche is, Shaw doesn’t even come close to a Chekhov in mentions on /lit/. His medium of plays don’t help either

[Anonymous No.22918363]

>>22918187
>>22918204
Some works are so ingrained into the literary landscape that they'll never disappear, they're too important not just to literature, but to the intellectual history of the Western world. Even if Horace and Homer isn't taught to schoolboys, it will always have an audience and a relevance to our culture. I also think there are a few works that get to the heart of the human condition in a way that nothing else has and become instantly and timelessly resonant, like King Lear, Paradise Lost and Frost at Midnight.

I think that originality is what makes the difference between "well-received" and "fondly remembered." The novel is a particularly settled form and most novels, no matter how well written of popular in their own time, will not pass into the canon because they ultimately have nothing unique to recommend them. I don't think we should be shocked at all when a novelist goes out of fashion, it's simply a reflection on the medium itself rather than an aberration.
When we look back at the 20th century and see who has survived it's not the writers of fine or insightful novels, it's authors like Wolfe, Joyce and Faulkner who have written novels like nothing that came before them who we remember.
This is true of "high" and "low" literature alike, it's a few pinnacles of utterly unique fiction like Tolkien and Lovecraft that stand above the sea of forgotten pulp.

Publishers change hands, the reading public moves onto the next babble and academics find new causes to find for, but until the rule of the Last Man people will be intuitively drawn towards originality.

[Anonymous No.22918371]

>>22914080
Last four are not really forgotten and are still sometimes read by the artsy hipster crowd for entertainment and poseur points. So still read by readers who are inclined to read if that makes sense, kind of like the same crowd that reads Didion. But maybe it’s because they’re the most recent, once you get to Yates and earlier in the century before the boomer experience it almost becomes academic to even those people I’ve noticed once you can’t score hipster social points with them, it’s like they can’t conceive that anything was worth reading outside of living memory. So in the long run you’re probably right, the last for in your lists days are numbered too

[Anonymous No.22918386]

>>22915290
Beware of Pity on the surface looks like a story John Green would write but Green would NEVER have the balls to take it in the direction Zweig did. Zweig is also max comfy, The World of Yesterday is just wonderful. And just because a writer is popular does not make them bad

[Anonymous No.22918422]

>>22914289
>>22914292
The time period he wrote in didn’t help. I’ve noticed a lot of English works written near the turn of the century and WWI have aged poorly in the public memory for a variety of reasons despite them having betting than certainly anything published today. Maybe it’s partly because they were so overshadowed by the modernist work that came after that only the most experimental work of that era is studied today and often sort of contrived into being proto-modernist or something, and in that era before WWI English and American books still stuck very strongly to the realist mode, so blame academia. Not much to study and write articles about in straight forward realist works after all, especially if they’re romances like what Caine wrote. Only the ones that were true artists survived in reputation until now like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, so maybe the wheat was separated a bit from the chaff as it were.

[Anonymous No.22918424]

>>22918371
I don’t think most of these will 100% fade into oblivion. They have a place in their era and will always supply a niche. I’d consider Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Defoe to be relegated to the back of the bench but all it takes is one movie, show, or popular book to give them some relevance again. Same thing could happen to Dreiser or Tarkington and company. Mailer has too strong of a personality and even if he’s hated I think he’ll be known in some regard, probably not for his books. Outside of the ~4 dozen writers firmly entrenched in “the canon”, the wider world of literature is liable to change according to modern sensibilities and media. At the end of the day if you are a serious reader, most writers will never be lost to you as they live on by themselves or through their influence in the work of others

[Anonymous No.22918434]

>>22918363
>originality is what makes the difference between "well-received" and "fondly remembered."
This is a little harrowing to think about, because it shows that our standards of art are not really formed by the innate artistic abilities of an author but rather a retroactive assessment of cultural development. Wolfe or Faulkner are not inherently better artists than other forgotten writers during their time who were far more popular and struck a chord with readers. But they innovated the medium of the novel and thus they are the ones regarded as immortal legends. Who determines this cultural legacy? Not the readers whom art is made for, but a class of elite literary scholars, publishing houses, academic institutions and governments who endorse certain writers as part of a greater artistic programme.

I think that this is bad. It's a very materialistic way of looking at art. Only the West sees its artistic culture in this way. They look at art as a linear, progressive path of development where most of what comes before them is rendered obsolete. But a path to where? The novel has been solved. There are no great innovators now. Artistic literature is not even popular anymore. There's obviously more to art than whoever can be the most "original." That's just one component of greatness among many others but that seems to be the only thing we consider. Tolstoy's views on art are genuinely more true than most of the shit we're taught

[Anonymous No.22918443]

>>22918434
I agree. Originality counts for something but raw power or perfection are more important. I don’t think there is an objective way to look at art for the most part but nothing will be truly 100% original

[Anonymous No.22918458]

>>22914299
Yep, Melville is a good case study of this. So what if he has the most masterful American writer between Poe and Twain, it was bad luck that sank his memory and good look that revived it through DH Lawrence and co. Bad luck that Melville never founded a school of writing, was just a bit out of the lock step of what his age considered fashionable writing, and then just simply stopped publishing novels after a while. Interesting how he did remain in the public consciousness while still alive as a “forgotten” writer, there’s a fascinating anecdote about the US President Chester A Arthur remembered who we was and even quoting from Moby Dick, and because he likes his books he saved Melville’s government job when he was going to be let go from it

[Anonymous No.22918462]

>>22918424
huh

[Anonymous No.22918481]

>>22914376
Ruskin is still remembered for his architectural writings in connection with Venice and the Gothic for those who care about that since length stuff doesn’t really age. Also a bit with Turner too but it was clear by the end of his life he had already far outlived the era of his best art criticism for painting. He is rightly forgotten for his political and social ideas which though might have been influential are laughable today, and I’m not talking about his marriage either

[Anonymous No.22918499]

>>22914376
The biggest problem is that Carlyle influenced people like Engels and then Engels influenced the entire planet. He was a stepping stone to much bolder, progressive critiques. His diagnosis of modern society was on point but his remedies are so unpopular that he doomed his legacy. No one at the time could have predicted how much political and artistic tastes would change in the coming years so I don't fault them for always praising Carlyle. I'm guessing that during the Victorian era there was a common belief that the modern world would reassess itself and change course to a degree so that we wouldn't end up with hyper-capitalist mutt societies of mental infants, but it didn't. Instead of Carlyle becoming our modern prophet as people believed, we instead built idols out of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, etc

>>22918481
Ruskin, Carlyle, Tolstoy, etc were more right than most of their contemporaries. History turned out wrong. Capitalism and liberal democracy will destroy the planet at this rate.

[Anonymous No.22918501]

>>22914759
Agree with you on Woolf. I think she’s a great artist still but I don’t view her the same after reading about those ridiculous and vindictive campaigns she launched against her fellow writers just because they didn’t subscribe to the narrow view of literature as advanced by her and her cronies in the Bloomsbury group. Glad Joyce came out of nowhere and buck broke her in part by being even more autistic but at least he kept mostly to himself about it

[Anonymous No.22918512]

>>22917507
Now there’s someone whose memory was killed by Hitler, a good many others were also retroactively killed like that. It’s amazing that someone like Celine survived now that I think of it

[Anonymous No.22918521]

>>22918434
I think you've drawn the wrong conclusion from my post. I don't think that literary merit is something decided in ivory towers, but by our intrinsic recognition of when we have read something that's entirely new, whether that's an original conception of what the novel can be or a timeless sentiment or experience that's been properly captured for the first time. It stands out from everything that comes before and you notice it in the same way that you notice a man who stands head and shoulders above a crowd. The forces you talked about can't elevate mediocrity or tear down greatness for long.

[Anonymous No.22918530]

>>22918501
>>22914759
Redpill me about what she said about Stevenson and Joyce

[Anonymous No.22918563]

>>22913874
I never seen anyone speak of Brockden Brown or Washington Irving on here, both early American period and both fantastic authors. They probably have a little too much soul and heart for your average /lit/tard, though.

[Anonymous No.22918565]

Many pre-Richardson and Austen romance writers. William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy and Hannah Wesbter Foster's The Coquette were immensely popular and were viewed as prescriptive literature for women to shape their opinions and roles in society. Clarissa and later works overshadowed them to the point where they're mostly forgotten

[Anonymous No.22918575]

>>22913874
As other anons said, Dreiser is finished, he will only be read nowadays by academics, which doesn’t bode well since he has little now to offer to modern academia. It took an aggressive shill campaign from HL Mencken to get him off the ground in the first place, and that was mainly because he was a useful person to use a mouthpiece for Mencken’s own ideas about literature. If I remember from the OP book though isn’t that book about authors that are truly so forgotten and have so little to offer that they wouldn’t even be remembered by a /lit/ thread even once for possibly the next hundred years? Because say what you want it’s obvious quite a few people know of Dreiser and he at least had something to offer

[Anonymous No.22918593]

>>22918563
Someone mentioned Brown in this very thread. I remember a few years ago people were mentioning Brown in connection to Melmoth the Wanderer when that had a bit of traction on /lit/ just because of how weird it was. Brown is definitely inferior though and he honestly wrote just too early in the American Gothic literary movement, read Sheppard Lee by Robert Montgomery Bird instead if you’re into that literary era but want something with a bit more merit

[Anonymous No.22918607]

>>22918521
I know that's not what you said, it's what I believe and I think that's the truth behind what we think about art and innovation. Originality is of course of paramount importance in defining a great artist but the idea that our assessments of art are 100% accurate, objective reverence for the very best ones is stupid. It's a very arrogant belief. We just happened to be wise enough to pick the very best artists to remember because they created literary movements that most average people don't give a shit about?

[Anonymous No.22918625]

>>22914258
>>22914292
>>22914289
This one is still blowing my mind. This guy was once in the company of Dickens, Wells, Wilde, Hardy, etc, and now he is a no-name. It's like Stalin's former friends that were purged and edited out of his his photographs. Totally written out of history.

[Anonymous No.22918633]

>>22918575
I do want to read him one day and a favorite writer of mine listed him on a long list of books that were his favorite an influenced him. An American Tragedy seems like it can be interesting. I find him fascinating as he was pretty influential at the turn of the century and ~a century later he is forgotten outside of forgotten writer lists lol.

Herbert Read, Maeterlinck, Wasserman, Restif de la Brettone, George du Maurier, WH Hudson are some names that are jumping to mind that I forgot. Anyone read any of them?

I’d like to give a shout out to John Cowper Powys and his brother. The former is great but struggles to stay in print with a lot of his best work. He’ll probably be forgotten eventually

[Anonymous No.22918749]

/// He was initially blackballed because of a dispute he once had with a couple of the committee members /// The appendix provides a very useful crib sheet for exams and reference /// Why has there been such a political flap over his appointment? /// Most people and organizations just roll over and give up when they're challenged or attacked by the IRS /// He walked out to jeers and catcalls /// To him, nationalism is an independent cultural construct and not just an epiphenomenon in the process of capitalist development /// Are you kids strapped in back there? /// These performance differences point to a pattern of highly variegated national responses to relatively similar sets of international constraints /// There was a lot of grousing about the last two Sopranos seasons, and the end remains divisive /// She liked me better from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me /// It's another moralizing tale filled with jejune platitudes /// Now seven months into hospice care, Jimmy continues to defy the odds /// The hokey stories of his impoverished childhood always surface at election time /// Stars twinkle in the night sky /// This idea has long been attributed to Keynes, but in fact he was not the first to think of it /// The guards conducted a shakedown of the prisoners' cells to look for weapons /// This limitation becomes problematic when mathematicians want to think about objects that are equivalent or isomorphic in some sense, if not necessarily equal in all respects /// Loss of memory is a natural concomitant of old age /// A relatively large number of bird names arise by onomatopoeia /// They drilled 361 holes into the base of the tower and filled them with mortar /// The long black wool coat has gold satin insets along its back and sleeves /// This year's cohort of graduates will have particular difficulties finding jobs /// Success is never as cut and dried as it seems; it's never all skipping through a field of tulips /// Distributed ledger technology, commonly known as blockchain, is the underpinning technology of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin /// The ball went right to him but he flubbed the catch /// The media seem determined not to miss any lurid detail in the unfolding drama /// As the surf crashed against a barrier of sand, pelicans, cormorants and ospreys soared over the dark water /// The newspaper would go to great lengths to get scoops, including by using underhanded techniques /// I hear encomiums on all sides as to his conduct ///

[Anonymous No.22918756]

I've been reading lots of 20th century fiction lately and it seems most of the authors have already declined in "cultural relevance", whatever that is. Out of the Americans, writers such as John Updike, Philip Roth, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, John Bellow. From other countries, Heinrich Böll, Gunter Grass, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortazar. In general it seems that very few books and authors actually survive to become classics and most are just eventually forgotten, no matter how good they are.

[Anonymous No.22918765]

>>22918633
Maeterlinck sounds right up my alley but I think it’s unfortunate he mainly wrote plays. I just simply don’t enjoy reading plays as much as I do prose because most of them clearly some extra element to get the full effect, whether that be the sound of an actor’s voice, costumes, visuals, etc. when prose is the full picture at once and needs nothing else added. Like I think someone like Chekhov has genuinely great plays, but I recently watched a performance of The Cherry Orchard and just by that alone has convinced me tenfold more that it’s a masterpiece. The way a good actor can deliver a line will make it stay in your head for far longer than just reading the words, anyone who was read then seen a play can vouch for this. Not a perfect comparison but it’s like reading the script of even a dialogue driven movie rather than seeing it, no right person in their mind would say they’re the same experience. Tangentially related but you mentioning Maeterlinck reminded me suddenly of Romain Rolland who was also massive in his day, now hardly read in the Anglosphere (maybe it’s different with the French though). I would feel bad for Rolland living so long then dying knowing his pacifist illusions were utterly shattered by WWII but not too bad considering how much he drank the Stalin kool aid, even more than Brecht which is quite an accomplishment.

I’ll have to read Powys, been on my radar for years but always seemed too much on the periphery + I don’t feel English enough. Maybe I’m blinded too much by the mainline canon though and need to take more excursions outside literally and literarily

[Anonymous No.22918767]

>>22913874
Horace Walpole

[Anonymous No.22918772]

>>22918767
Also Trollope

[Anonymous No.22918902]

>>22918633
>John Cowper Powys
I tried to read Wolf Solent and I have to admit it filtered me. I can't imagine a contemporary casual reader trying it.

[Anonymous No.22918930]

>>22913874
The Benson brothers were such interesting figures, but barely anybody talks about them nowadays.

E. F. is still kinda remembered thanks to the Mapp & Lucia series and a couple of ghost stories. A. C. wrote the lyrics of Land of Hope and Glory, but his books are totally forgotten. Robert Hugh has Lord of the World, a tradcath favorite (despite the fact he was a raging sodomite, like the other two).

[Anonymous No.22918954]

>>22918204
>Some of my favorite writers are those fading stars and though it makes me sad that the vast reading public will never see what I see in such figures, I will always take solace in the fact that they mean something special to me, and no amount of popularity or lack there of will take it away
I agree, even though sometimes I wish I could talk with other people about their works.

[Anonymous No.22919119]

>>22913874
The usual answer to this question is Galsworthy, but I guess he's now too obscure to even be mentioned in a thread like this.

One of the best things about The Forsyte Saga, his series of books that made him famous, is that you can feel the change from youthful liberalism to aged conservatism as Galsworthy writes. In the earlier volumes, written in the late 19th century, it's clear that Galsworthy has created the young red-blooded passionate people as heroes held back by cold thinkers, money men, and moralisers. By the final volume in the 1920s, his sympathies have completely switched, which retroactively makes it look the characters had more depth than they really did when he started writing.

Another English novelist (though more of a playwright) who is now forgotten is Charles Reade. He was among the most widely-read writers of the mid-19th century, but like so many other authors he fell foul of Dickens, and was never very highly regarded by the cognoscenti. I rather enjoyed his human-condition novel "It is Never Too Late to Mend".

[Anonymous No.22919124]

>>22918772
Trollope is huge in Britain, ironically especially in provincial conservative circles for which he would have had considerable distaste as an arch capital-L Liberal.

[Anonymous No.22919131]

>>22917311
>>22917383
It's Eev-lin. His first marriage was to another Evelyn, and their friend's used to call them Hevelyn and Shevelyn.

[Anonymous No.22919134]

>>22919124
The liberals of today will be the conservatives of the future. I’m sure Trollope would be considered conservative today

[Anonymous No.22919136]

>>22917311
>>22917383
It's Eev-lin. His first marriage was to another Evelyn, and their friends used to call them Hevelyn and Shevelyn.

[Anonymous No.22919148]

>>22919134
Even in his own time he was looked at as rather a crusty, provincial, right-wing sort of chap by much of the Liberal party, and he had little sympathy for the radicals in the party who would much later be spun off into the Labour party. Still, he was in favour of things like metrification, currency decimalisation and European integration, which are still recognisably Liberal Democrat-ish tendencies.

[Anonymous No.22919213]

>>22918756
I think Solzhenitsyn is doing ok if you count his ideologically motivated fans that popped up recently and Rushdie is all right too. But the realists you mentioned like Roth, Cheever, Malamud, Bellow are slowly vanishing. Grass I keep hearing about sometimes. It's sad how many respected names are being forgotten.
But diligent reading is becoming obsolete either way so...

[Anonymous No.22919257]

>>22917239
anon that's a seinfeld reference

[Anonymous No.22919531]

Kingsley was so popular they named a village after one of his novels but has been utterly forgotten

[Anonymous No.22919833]

>>22918575
I should read Dreiser sometime since he's a fellow Hoosier.
I wonder how many forgotten authors end up mostly read by people looking for authors from the same region or ethnicity.

[Anonymous No.22920044]

>>22919833
That seems to be the case with >>22914258, since many of his books are set in the Isle of Man.

[Anonymous No.22920219]

>>22918501
There’s a common link with many of the writers mentioned on this thread when I search them up. They were hated by Woolfe. What a fucking cunt. I have to assume that her and her friends were successful in destroying their reputations because of how seriously she is taken

[Anonymous No.22920326]

>>22914557
yep too based

[Anonymouṡ No.22920415]

>>22913874

Peter Cheyney was the #1 bestselling author in England in the 1930s/40s. He's pretty good if you like noir. I have all his books but no-one knows he exists any more. <Pic attached> introduces his best character, Callaghan, a London private detective.

[Anonymouṡ No.22920458]

>>22914376
Ruskin was more famous & mainstream in his day and is more forgotten now, I think. Carlyle isn't going anywhere.

>>22914386
Carlyle had to rewrite the entire book by memory lol
It was worse than that. He'd also destroyed all his notes hahaha. He said that re-writing it without them was like "trying to swim without water". Poor Carlyle.

[Anonymouṡ No.22920480]

>>22913874
Someone who was famous in his day but seems to be getting left behind by history, and rightly so — John Betjeman. I can't stand him (mostly because he can't make up his mind whether he wants to be serious or not). Philip Larkin thought he was great, which is just funny, because Larkin was ten times better. It's rare for artists to over-rate other artists. Normally it's the other way round.

[Anonymous No.22920492]

>>22913874
william burroughs, back when people understood that homosexuals were gross and drug addicts were degenerates
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XOB5syfDOB0

[Anonymous No.22920517]

>>22920492
>Queer getting a film adaptation
Williechads, we keep winning.

[Anonymous No.22920523]

>>22918530
:(

[Anonymous No.22920524]

>>22920492
Burroughs isn't even remotely forgotten, nor has he experienced a decline in reputation.

[Anonymous No.22920529]

>>22920524
This. Wtf?

[Anonymouṡ No.22920535]

>>22914346
I don't think Cheever is going away. That said, the straitlaced 1950s surburban world that he criticizes doesn't seem so bad now, given what's replaced it. So it's a bit harder to sympathize with him.

>>22914080
>>22914101
I think the late-20th-century U.S.A. realist author who will survive the best is Raymond Carver, because he's least tied to his period. (And because he's the best.)

[Anonymous No.22920543]

>>22920492
He’s doing alright. Ginsberg is being forgotten. It turns out Jewish pedophiles are not so in vogue anymore.

[Anonymous No.22920571]

>>22920535
>the straitlaced 1950s surburban world that he criticizes doesn't seem so bad now
Yeah, in fact it actually gives his stories some comfy vibes.

[Anonymouṡ No.22920622]

>>22918350
>Brautigan is in decline
I think he's finding his proper level, which is a decent niche writer.

It's just that in the late 60s / 70s, his niche-ness happened to resonate, so he became more popular than he "deserved".

He's good at what he does, but what he does is very narrow. You can't live entirely on a diet of Brautigan, but he's worth an occasional look.

[Anonymouṡ No.22920632]

>>22913874
Not a writer exactly, but a single work —

Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

There was a brief period when lots of people thought this was really good. Then gradually sanity reasserted itself and pronounced sentence, which is that it's not worth much.

Time may not be a perfect critic but it's the best one.

[Anonymous No.22920636]

A month or so ago an anon recommended John Hawkes. He is a good writer to check out, especially if you enjoy reading Nabokov.

[Anonymous No.22920648]

>>22920632
>look it up on amazon
>12,000 reviews
you are totally pseud

[Anonymous No.22920657]

>>22913874
Writers go one of two ways: to legendary and iconic status, or to “forgotten” status

There are tiers in the forgotten status and many writers will be popular in a certain niche or develop a cult following. Others will be curiosities and a serious reader will often know of them but have to go off the beaten path to pick up one of their books. Then there are forgotten writers who are truly forgotten but fall into 2 categories: the forgotten writer known for being forgotten, and the utterly forgotten writer who is a literal who

For every Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, and Proust, there are dozens who aren’t remembered. There really isn’t an in between in popular consciousness. That’s just the way the world turns and it doesn’t mean the forgotten writers are bad

[Anonymouṡ No.22920691]

>>22920648
That surprised me so I had a look on Goodreads and it has about 220K ratings there. To give a bit of perspective Catch-22 has about 800K. So yes, it's holding up better than I thought.

(The Goodreads average ranking is 3.78 but that doesn't mean much because most rankings there are between 3.5 and 4.5.)

[Anonymouṡ No.22920723]

>>22920657
>the forgotten writer known for being forgotten,
I guess this means, no-one reads their books, but they're remembered for a meme, e.g. Bulwer-Lytton (the "dark and stormy night") guy.

I think the reason a decent writer might get forgotten is there's a better person doing the same thing. Bulwer-Lytton was sort of writing like Dickens, so even though he's not that bad, Dickens just squashed him.

I guess the moral is: If you're not first-rate, and you want to survive, you need to do something that no-one else is doing. Maybe Niggerman is a bit like that?

[Anonymous No.22920741]

>>22920723
Yeah he’s a good example. Funny because a lot of writers praised Last Days of Pompeii which is pretty much forgotten but the open sentence has become a trope in itself

[Anonymous No.22920816]

James Branch Cabell
>Cabell's work was highly regarded by a number of his peers, including Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Joseph Hergesheimer, and Jack Woodford. Although now largely forgotten by the general public, his work was remarkably influential on later authors of fantasy fiction.

>Cabell's best-known book, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919), was the subject of a celebrated obscenity case shortly after its publication. The eponymous hero, who considers himself a "monstrous clever fellow", embarks on a journey through ever more fantastic realms, even to hell and heaven. Everywhere he goes, he winds up seducing the local women, even the Devil's wife.

The novel was denounced by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; they attempted to bring a prosecution for obscenity. The case went on for two years before Cabell and his publisher, Robert M. McBride, won: the "indecencies" were double entendres that also had a perfectly decent interpretation, though it appeared that what had actually offended the prosecution most was a joke about papal infallibility.

>Swanwick places much of the blame for Cabell's obscurity on Cabell himself, for authorizing the 18-volume Storisende uniform edition of the Biography of the Life of Manuel, including much that was of poor quality and ephemeral. This alienated admirers and scared off potential new readers. "There are, alas, an infinite number of ways for a writer to destroy himself," Swanwick wrote. "James Branch Cabell chose one of the more interesting. Standing at the helm of the single most successful literary career of any fantasist of the twentieth century, he drove the great ship of his career straight and unerringly onto the rocks."

>Interest in Cabell declined in the 1930s, a decline that has been attributed in part to his failure to move out of his fantasy niche despite the onset of World War II. Alfred Kazin said that "Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe".

[Anonymous No.22920849]

>>22913874
A few more: Jean Paul Richter, Niebuhr, Wendell Berry, Walker Percy, Breslin, John O’Hara, lots of 17th and 18th century English poets

[Anonymous No.22920858]

What forgotten authors deserve to be forgotten? Which ones don’t deserve it?

[Anonymous No.22920874]

>James Rufus Agee (/ˈeJdʒiː/ AY-jee; November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for Time Magazine, he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize. Agee is also known as a co-writer of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and as the screenwriter of the film classics The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter.

the only reason anyone knows him anymore is if they went to UT Knoxville. the house that ADITF was set in is just across the Strip from the campus in Fort Sanders, the large Victorian houses of which are split into apartments housing approximately half the students. they renamed one of the streets after him in the late 90s, 15th street iirc.

[Anonymous No.22920912]

>>22913874
To switch it up a bit who are some giants in literature, like firmly western canon, whose star has faded even if they aren’t forgotten?

I love Rabelais but does anyone really read him anymore? Erasmus too for that matter. Some of those Roman historians might fit into this category, maybe Roman playwrights too like Terence and Plautus. Early English novelists come to mind as well

[Anonymous No.22921043]

>>22919136

That's what I suspected. Now how do you pronounce Waugh?

Is it like Woe or like Waug?

[Anonymouṡ No.22921073]

>>22920912
>giant
>star faded
The Pilgrim's Progress used to be the most-read book in the English-speaking world after the Bible. It's still around but obviously nothing like so popular & influential.

[Anonymous No.22921085]

>>22921043
It sounds like the British pronunciation of 'war'.

[Anonymouṡ No.22921093]

>>22920849
>lots of 17th and 18th century English poets

English Poets Laureate:

John Dryden (1668–89)
Thomas Shadwell (1689–92)
Nahum Tate (1692–1715)
Nicholas Rowe (1715–18)
Laurence Eusden (1718–30)
Colley Cibber (1730–57)
William Whitehead (1757–85)
Thomas Warton (1785–90)
Henry James Pye (1790–1813)
Robert Southey (1813–43)
William Wordsworth (1843–50)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1850–92)
Alfred Austin (1896–1913)
Robert Bridges (1913–30)
John Masefield (1930–67)
Cecil Day-Lewis (1968–72)
Sir John Betjeman (1972–84)
Ted Hughes (1984–98)
Andrew Motion (1999–2009)
Carol Ann Duffy (2009–19)
Simon Armitage (2019– )

Only perhaps half-a-dozen are really well-known these days.

[Anonymous No.22921130]

>>22914376
Carlyle was actually mentioned in newspaper article in my home state about several years ago, so he’s still being read and I imagine that he’s going to have a revival.

[Anonymous No.22921136]

>>22921130
> I imagine that he’s going to have a revival.
No

[Anonymous No.22921429]

>>22913874
Vardis Fisher :

https://www.associationmormonletters.org/2016/10/on-not-completely-forgetting-about-vardis-fisher/

[Anonymous No.22921762]

>>22913874
I am reading Trollope's The Way We Live Now and I think he might qualify. I've almost never seen him mentioned.

[Anonymous No.22921825]

>>22920849
Walker Percy I feel like is decently known because he had a lot of stuff get republished somewhat recently. Definitely one of the South’s most able writers post-Faulkner

[Anonymous No.22921835]

>>22914036
>>22914065
Appreciate it, read The Rose Garden just today and was very pleasantly surprised.
It's a shame that aside from an old New Yorker stories collection my library has nothing by her

[Anonymous No.22921879]

>>22914585
>assign Twain in public schools
>having schoolchildren read the n word
yikes

[Anonymous No.22921956]

>>22920816
Deserves to be forgotten. Jurgen was a smug and tedious book.

[Anonymous No.22921966]

>>22913874
Pedro Mexia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Mexía

[Anonymous No.22922004]

>>22918633
I've read Trilby, The Bluebird, and all of MM's fabulous insect books (bees, ants, termites)

[Anonymous No.22922011]

>>22922004
Who’s MM?

[Anonymous No.22922039]

>>22920657
>popular in a certain niche
>a serious reader will often know of them but have to go off the beaten path to pick up one of their books
I'm very familiar with those types. The kind where it's hard to name them but they come up when you're talking about a period, genre, or very specific chain of influences. There are also authors who appeal to very niche audiences and I don't think the content and style of their work will ever appeal to the mainstream but they exist within their own canon and remain known.

[Anonymous No.22922195]

>nobody has mentioned Walter Scott
Formerly the most popular writer of the 19th century. Influenced all the great authors that we know today. A legend in his time. But his books are barely read today. They are historical fictions that Westerners, a people now obsessed with tearing down the past and insulting their heritage, probably don't care much for these days.

[Anonymous No.22922205]

>>22922195
He fits in more with the literary giants whose stars have faded categories. He’s definitely not forgotten. James Fenimore Cooper occupies a similar position but with less stature

[Anonymous No.22922278]

>>22922011
Maurice Maeterlinck

[Anonymous No.22922455]

>>22914006
>>22914601
Wolfe's underrated.
>A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.
>Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.
>The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.
>This is a moment:
Hell of a start to a novel. In his time he was a favorite to win the Nobel prize -- I can't think of another American writer whose star fell farther than Wolfe's. I wouldn't go so far as to call LHA a masterpiece, though. It's pretty uneven. At his best, Wolfe's a geyser, a torrent, a tsunami of feeling and power and perception and densely webbed life -- at his worst, he's intolerably purple, overblown, so sentimental you want to strangle him. Faulkner thought he was the greatest writer of his generation because his failures were the greatest, which is a good way of looking at him.
>>22914033
Pretty bloated. I wonder what would've happened had Wolfe lived to complete The October Fair. That is, if he was ever actually writing anything of the sort. He claimed that LHA and Of Time and the River were the first two books in a six or seven book epic of midcentury America, and he claimed he'd written a third or so of it when he died. Gotta take that with a grain of salt though because Wolfe would just lie all the time. He did write incessantly (picrel, him standing on his manuscripts for Look Homeward Angel; according to legend the manuscript had to be taken to Scribner's offices in a truck) so maybe he did get pretty far into it. His posthumous work is okay. You Can't Go Home Again has its moments. The Party at Jack's is an interesting experiment. The Web and the Rock/Web and the Root are mostly shit. IMO Wolfe was overrated in his time and now slightly underrated in ours.

[Anonymous No.22922481]

>>22922455
Nta but LHA gave me one of the strangest vivid reading experiences. It’s almost hard to explain but it had like a choppy graphic novel type affect with me washing over me with strong imagery and grotesque characters. I can never properly explain it but I loved the book. It’s been probably 5 years and I should reread it or check out his other stuff. I have the highest praise for books that have a unique type of reading experience for me in a very atmospheric way

[Anonymous No.22922503]

>>22922455
Why was the manuscript so big? Thick pages?

[Anonymous No.22922515]

>>22913874
Frank Norris and Edwin Arlington Ronbinson come to mind, but like other anons said there are like a dozen authors from the gilded age or the progressive era who were super famous but are completely forgotten by the contemporary mainstream.

[Anonymous No.22922528]

>>22922455
>He must be cancelled! He was a misogynist chud!

[Anonymous No.22922533]

>>22920535
>That said, the straitlaced 1950s surburban world that he criticizes doesn't seem so bad now, given what's replaced it. So it's a bit harder to sympathize with him

I often feel this way about a lot of the 19th century authors. Like I get it that victorian england or the third french republic was super constrictive and that the average middle class normie will always be a retarded conformist crab in a bucket that no creative person suffers easily but from the perspective of the present their hell seems like a heaven for anyone sane nowadays.

[Anonymous No.22922555]

>>22914376
I think his primary issue aside from the Hitler association is that he's basically the prototype of the modern political radical and as such he is neither fish nor fowl yet. Chuds might come the closest to appreciating him on his own terms but his intense christian spirituality and Cromwell idolatry doesn't sit quite right with most of them. Ruskin has a similar problem but Ruskin is just a lot more niche in general and far less radical in his politics from what I have read.

[Anonymous No.22922556]

>>22922533
huh

[Anonymous No.22922565]

>>22922555
> Cromwell idolatry
That’s pretty cringe for different reasons

[Anonymous No.22922567]

>>22913964
OP didn't even mention any author, retard.

[Anonymous No.22922568]

VS NAIPAUL
GRAHAM GREENE
JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE
LAURENCE STERNE

[Anonymous No.22922573]

>>22913874
Out of every writer who makes a stir in the literary world by writing “literature” not genre (though some blend) only a small percentage will be considered with prestige. Probably 5-10% of the writers of stature are immortalized to some degree while ~90% go into one of the forgotten realm tiers

[Anonymous No.22922579]

>>22914032
>And his political beliefs are so hilariously obsolete

Wasn't he super libtarded? Brecht has been getting by primarily on the basis of being in tune with western political trends for decades now. No reason why it wouldn't work for Shaw, he just needs to be resuscitated by getting jacked off a couple of times by coastal journalists for being "eerily prescient" and "extremely relevant to the political trends of the present".

[Anonymous No.22922585]

>>22922567
The book in the OP, he probably meant

[Anonymous No.22922586]

>>22922573
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

[Anonymous No.22922592]

>>22922579
> Wasn't he super libtarded?
No, he was a commie who supported eugenics.

[Anonymous No.22922600]

>>22914561
>>22914036
One would think that in the current times where people with the right opinion push minorities to the forefront and dismantle the white male canon these authors would get a a rediscovery, but no.
I guess their best chance could happen if there are tiktokers browsing this thread to steal ideas, as they could use them as click bait for their next trend.

[Anonymous No.22922607]

>>22913874
Obviously they are nowhere near forgotten and probably never will be forgotten but Pound and Eliot have been on the decline for decades now as far as academic prestige goes. They are in that awkward zone where they are far too important to be just memory holed but their aesthetics and politics grate on the average academic's tastes so hard that they would rather enshrine anyone else but them as the kings of modernism.

Wyndham Lewis, on the other hand, has been completely memory holed...despite recanting his views in the 30s. To be frank he's a far more uneven artist than Pound or Eliot but he was one of the OGs, and what little I read of his early stuff is certainly worthy of more attention than none at all.

[Anonymous No.22922614]

>>22922607
In the case of Pound there's probably also the aspect of his disciples dying out at play. Anyone who has read Kenner's The Pound Era knows the absolutely crazy number of people he was in contact with, how many people's careers he helped start. But that generation has died out completely.

[Anonymous No.22922615]

>>22914258
Looks like he pandered to the sensation-seeking soft-core-porn reading public...
>He wrote fifteen novels on subjects of adultery, divorce, domestic violence, illegitimacy, infanticide, religious bigotry and women's rights, became an international literary celebrity, and sold a total of ten million books.

[Anonymous No.22922619]

>>22922607
Pound is actually growing in popularity slightly

[Anonymous No.22922624]

>>22922579
He was a commie eugenicist with fascist sympathies

[Anonymous No.22922632]

Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers should by all means be considered one of the absolute top works of the 20th century and yet it feels very few people read him today. Maybe some discover him through Kundera's essays but that's it.

[Anonymous No.22922636]

>>22922619
You think so? I guess he has a perpetual appeal for chuds but the mainstream certainly cooled in their admiration. Especially considering that his style has become far more obscure due to a precipitous decline in cultural literacy. Latin used to be compulsory in basic education, nowadays not even classics graduates can read Latin.

[Anonymous No.22922663]

>>22922586
Interesting but I don’t think that “forgotten” writers are necessarily bad. Some of my favorites and desert island books fall into the “forgotten writer” realm though they do have some appeal to a subsection of readers and remain in print. I just think that fame is a fickle whore but I also think many of them deserve it. There can only be so many monumental famous writers

[Anonymous No.22923028]

Would Shelby Foote and William Styron count? It feels like more people know Foote for the PBS Civil War doc than his works these days

[Anonymous No.22923034]

>>22922607
Do people still read Hilda Doolite these days either?

[Anonymous No.22923039]

>>22923028
Really? I just bought his Civil War box set because this board and a writer recommended it. I just started the first book and it’s excellent. Shame he’s being forgotten.

[Anonymous No.22923051]

>>22923039
It's somewhat associated with Foote's Lost Cause sympathies now, especially with its portrayal of Forrest.

[Anonymous No.22923139]

I don't see Charles Lamb mentioned much anymore beyond older authors who were themselves influenced by him. Also he has one hell of a life story, was buddies with Coleridge, Wordsworth and all that circle, his sister murdered their mother, and then became a famous essayist while taking care of his insane sister.

[Anonymous No.22923342]

>>22922568
>VS NAIPAUL
Not really, he's probably one of the first writers recommended in articles or videos about literature from non-European authors.
>GRAHAM GREENE
Less influential than in his lifetime, but fairly well-remembered. Catholic reading groups will always recommend stuff like The Power and the Glory or Brighton Rock
I agree about the other two though

[Anonymous No.22923351]

>>22922632
>The Sleepwalkers should by all means be considered one of the absolute top works of the 20th century and yet it feels very few people read him today
It is considered that you absolute retard. Just because you discovered him last year does not make your idiotic conjecturing valid and grounded in reality

[Anonymous No.22923359]

>>22922607
>Wyndham Lewis
>memory holed
>To be frank
>what little I read
You genuinely have down syndrome.

[Anonymous No.22923406]

>>22914386
>While in Mill's care the manuscript was destroyed, according to Mill by a careless household maid who mistook it for trash and used it as a firelighter. Carlyle then rewrote the entire manuscript, achieving what he described as a book that came "direct and flamingly from the heart."

[Anonymous No.22923413]

>>22913874
Is Ibsen still important? Spengler considered him to be equal Freud in influence.

[Anonymous No.22923428]

Welty.

[Anonymous No.22924225]

>>22914304
Tristram Shandy is definitely not forgotten. It’s still being sold by Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics, still gets translated into other languages and even got a movie in 2005. It gets talked about whenever there’s talk about experimental novels, or the precursors of the postmodern novel.

[Anonymous No.22924282]

>>22914376
Carlyle’s popularity is on the rise again actually after nearly a century of being in decline.

[Anonymous No.22924288]

>>22914376
>>22918499
What was Carlyle's diagnosis?

[Anonymous No.22924317]

>>22923413
Speaking of which, Spengler himself has been mostly forgotten, despite him being hugely influential
>Cited as influence Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Adorno, Toynbee, and Kissinger
>Forgotten now outside of some far right and Islamist circles

[Anonymous No.22924327]

>>22924317
Nah he's fairly well-known among 20th century rightists. Toynbee is much more obscure today

[Anonymous No.22924345]

>>22924288
https://counter-currents.com/2014/11/thomas-carlyle-the-sage-of-chelsea-2/

>Observe, however, that of man’s whole terrestrial possessions and attainments, unspeakably the noblest are his Symbols, divine or divine-seeming; under which he marches and fights, with victorious assurance, in this life-battle: what we can call his Realised Ideals. Of which realised ideals, omitting the rest, consider only these two: his Church, or spiritual Guidance; his Kingship, or temporal one. The Church: what a word was there; richer than Golconda and the treasures of the world! In the heart of the remotest mountains rises the little Kirk; the Dead all slumbering round it, under their white memorial-stones, “in hope of a happy resurrection:”—dull wert thou, O Reader, if never in any hour (say of moaning midnight, when such Kirk hung spectral in the sky, and Being was as if swallowed up of Darkness) it spoke to thee—things unspeakable, that went into thy soul’s soul. Strong was he that had a Church, what we can call a Church: he stood thereby, though “in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities,” yet manlike towards God and man; the vague shoreless Universe had become for him a firm city, and dwelling which he knew. Such virtue was in Belief; in these words, well spoken: I believe. Well might men prize their Credo, and raise stateliest Temples for it, and reverend Hierarchies, and give it the tithe of their substance; it was worth living for and dying for.

...

>How such Ideals do realise themselves; and grow, wondrously, from amid the incongruous ever-fluctuating chaos of the Actual: this is what World-History, if it teach any thing, has to teach us, How they grow; and, after long stormy growth, bloom out mature, supreme; then quickly (for the blossom is brief) fall into decay; sorrowfully dwindle; and crumble down, or rush down, noisily or noiselessly disappearing.

...

>But of those decadent ages in which no Ideal either grows or blossoms? When Belief and Loyalty have passed away, and only the cant and false echo of them remains; and all Solemnity has become Pageantry; and the Creed of persons in authority has become one of two things: an Imbecility or a Macchiavelism? Alas, of these ages World-History can take no notice; they have to become compressed more and more, and finally suppressed in the Annals of Mankind; blotted out as spurious,—which indeed they are. Hapless ages: wherein, if ever in any, it is an unhappiness to be born. To be born, and to learn only, by every tradition and example, that God’s Universe is Belial’s and a Lie; and “the Supreme Quack” the hierarch of men! In which mournfulest faith, nevertheless, do we not see whole generations (two, and sometimes even three successively) live, what they call living; and vanish,—without chance of reappearance?
(from The French Revolution: A History)

[Anonymous No.22924355]

>I esteem the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that in short, there is nothing divine whatever in the association of men, a still more despicable error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century, than that of a "divine right" in people called Kings. I say, Find me the true Konning, King, or Able-man, and he has a divine right over me. That we knew in some tolerable measure how to find him, and that all men were ready to acknowledge his divine right when found: this is precisely the healing which a sick world is everywhere, in these ages, seeking after! The true King, as guide of the practical, has ever something of the Pontiff in him,—guide of the spiritual, from which all practice has its rise. This too is a true saying, That the King is head of the Church.—But we will leave the Polemic stuff of a dead century to lie quiet on its bookshelves.

>Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Ableman to seek, and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it! That is the world's sad predicament in these times of ours. They are times of revolution, and have long been.
(from On Heroes & Hero-Worship)

[Anonymous No.22924401]

https://counter-currents.com/2013/10/the-fascist-dream-part-1/
https://counter-currents.com/2013/09/what-is-fascism/

"The evolution of fascism during the war has escaped almost all observers, who were eager to condemn and scarcely concerned with exact history. At the beginning of the war, fascism was nationalist, arrogant, imperturbable. It affirmed the triumph of certain human qualities over a certain human mediocrity. It imposed this triumph over all complaints; it promised nothing; it cared little about being admired or supposedly imitated.

But then the gigantic character of the war, the apparition of the two great poles of modern times from the mist in which they were barely discernable, made the fascists realize both the fragility of fascism and also its meaning. Then the government of Hitler spoke to Europe: it appeared as a future, as a reward, as a rehabilitation. It hardly matters if he was sincere or trying to deceive. For those who fought and lived for fascism, the fascist idea had a dramatic new content, which it did not have before.

They were told that fascism was the best defense against communism and also the struggle against a destructive liberalism. But now they knew that fascism was a vital struggle, a desperate defense. They knew that a fascist victory was the only chance to establish a third order, a third world and that the defeat of fascism condemned men, for who knows how long, to the sterile opposition of liberal democracy and communism.

They also knew that the idea of European unity was not merely a propaganda theme: this unity is necessary; it is the only way to save us from the two monsters that had appeared; and if fascism lost the war, they knew this unity would not be realized, for Europe would be a conquered land; it would become part of the United States or Soviet Russia; it would become a dependent land, a new type of colony; it would never have the opportunity to realize this original conception of politics, this new idea of man that only it could support.

[Anonymous No.22924418]

>>22918181
>>22918315
It is astounding how far Henry Miller's public reputation has fallen. Norman Mailer (another American master falling into decline) has an excellent monograph on Miller's work called "Genius and Lust" worth reading.

[Anonymous No.22924439]

>>22924418
I think Miller’s reputation rests with people who never read him. They just know the censorship and the NC-17 movie. The sex stuff in Tropic of Cancer isn’t even that bad and it’s mostly done for laughs or to show the seediness for what is Miller’s thoughts about the problems of society. There is no dick in your hand passages. Only smut book he wrote is extremely minor, Under the Rooftops of Paris, and he was pretty crass with his wife in Sexus. Lots of his other books and writings are very spiritual and totally the opposite of his reputation. He is specifically focused on the artist and his journey to becoming an artist and why it was so important to him. He was one of the “society is terrible” type of people but he actually offered solutions. He could be uneven at times but when he wrote at his best, he was was one of the best and wrote with fire. He is a very inspirational figure, one of my favorite writers, and I think many people can benefit from reading some of his books. It’s a shame his reputation doesn’t really match up to reality. He will always have a cult following of sorts and those who like him are pretty passionate about him. Women tend to love him which is a little surprising on the surface

[Anonymous No.22924648]

>>22924345
What is so profound about it? Maybe it has become so ubiquitous as to be obvious, but i do not really see it.

[Anonymous No.22925312]

>>22913874
Bump

[Anonymous No.22925369]

>>22924439

[Anonymous No.22925448]

Can anyone explain why HG Wells is often ignored as a nonfiction writer? Reading his political works is literally like reading a blueprint for liberal globohomo. He is arguably more relevant than ever.

[Anonymous No.22925471]

>>22922632
People who would enjoy him will eventually find out who he is. People who won't will naturally stay away. He just doesn't and never had academics or other non-German writers shilling for him in his lifetime or after, if anything he's probably become better appreciated after his death

[Anonymous No.22925993]

>>22923351
I have been posting about Broch on /lit/ since 2014, and there's always only one or two anons who reply. Never been in the /lit/ top 100. And that's just on /lit/, but I've had the same experience at my uni and on truelit.

[Anonymous No.22926695]

>>22922455
>Faulkner thought he was the greatest writer of his generation because his failures were the greatest,
I believe the Faulkner quote re Wolfe as one of the novelists of the time was, "He tried the hardest to say the most." If Faulkner could think that highly of him, it's not for /lit/ to dis the guy.

[Anonymous No.22926712]

>>22922455
You’re a retard engaged in glorified gossip. Nothing remotely interesting about Wolfe in your wikipedia-tier post

[Anonymous No.22926718]

>>22914032
Absolute bullshit, so stupid as not to be worth arguing. The proof is the plays. Read Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra. If he's not popular today it's because he was a straight white male and never a nihilist. "Bernard Shaw is apparently considered Britain's best playwright after Shakespeare..." True. But that's because Shaw had a brain, unlike Shakepeare, and when you're writing for a brainless mass audience, like favors like.

[Anonymous No.22926722]

>>22926695
The actual excerpt that the retard is misparaphrasing
> Unidentified participant: Sir, you mentioned Thomas Wolfe [as being of your generation. Would you comment on his place in American] [...]?
>William Faulkner: It's too soon to—to say, I think. It takes—takes a little time before the—the dross evaporates from anyone's work, until there's a distance for a true perspective. At one time, I was asked to—what I thought of my contemporaries. I said, "It's too soon to tell." The questioner said, "Well, haven't you got any opinion of them at all." I—I said, "Opinion of who?" He named Wolfe, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Caldwell, and me. I rated them then Wolfe first, me second, Dos Passos, Caldwell, and Hemingway. [audience laughter] Not on—on what we'd accomplished, but only on the single general ground I could find, which was the—the attempt to do more than we could do, on the failure. I rated Wolfe because his was the most splendid failure. He had tried hardest to take all the experience that he was capable of observing and imagining and put it down in one book, on the head of a pin. He had the courage to experiment, to be—to write nonsense, to be foolish, to be sentimental, in the attempt to get down the—that single moving and passionate instance of man's struggle. I rated myself next because I had tried next hardest to get everything on one page. I rated the others down to Hemingway, not on the value of his work, which I thought was, per se, the best because it was intact and complete. But his was—showed less desire to try to get all of man's heart onto the pinhead. So I think it's too soon for anyone to have a—have an opinion about Wolfe. Maybe the only opinion to have about anybody is, "Do I like to read him or don't I?" And if I like to read him, he's all right. If I don't like to read him, then he may be all right for somebody else, but he ain't my cup of tea. [audience laughter]

[Anonymous No.22926723]

>>22922567
The fucking book that inspired this shit thread, you retarded mutt

[Anonymous No.22926724]

>>22926718
> If he's not popular today it's because he was a straight white male
Do you freaks never get tired of playing the victim?

[Anonymous No.22926728]

>>22913874
Mervyn Peake
Joseph Conrad
Charles Baudelaire

[Anonymous No.22926749]

>>22914101
>Realism is extremely forgettable
Not true. Realism turns into surrealism the farther away we get to it. If I want to experience something new and different and memorable I don't watch shit like Star Trek Discovery or Euphoria, where every character is predictably black, queer, trans, a Strongk Womyn, where every villain a white male, where everything revolves around 'oppression'; I read Bellow or Hemingway or Mailer, where the characters resemble human beings and not Woke caricatures.

[Anonymous No.22926752]

>>22926728
>Mervyn Peake
He has gone nowhere and is arguably more popular today than in the intervening years. Fantasy being total dogshit for the past 20 years has brought Gormengast back into the limelight.

[Anonymous No.22926765]

>>22926749
This is your brain on the "culture war".

[Anonymous No.22926769]

>>22914258
>>22914289
What should I read from him?

[Anonymous No.22926775]

>>22926765
He didn't whine about Bellow and Mailer being Jews though.

[Anonymous No.22926817]

>>22926724
Fuck off back to Pakistan.

[Anonymous No.22926841]

>>22926728
>Joseph Conrad
Less prominent than in his lifetime, but Heart of Darkness ensures he will continue to be read, even if it's arguably not his best.

[Anonymous No.22926870]

>>22914032
>>22922579
Georges Bernard Shaw is a prime example of extreme fame in his lifetime followed by steep and seemingly permanent oblivion.
I am in possession of an edition of a selection of works published in the 1930s and the introduction is comical in terms of hyperbolic praise.
>his political beliefs are so hilariously obsolete
This probably plays a part. the man was openly pro-fascist, plus a brazen white supremacist, pro-soviet Stalin apologist but at the same time an ardent ultra-feminist cheering for matriarchal mommydom then looping it with old school hardcore negative eugenism and sprinkled with total nationalisation-socialization welfare statism. It's like he was trolling to get everyone against him but every witness vouch for his genuineness in all of this.

[Anonymous No.22926965]

>>22914101
>Realism is extremely forgettable
Balzac...memory holed.

>>22914231
As a novelist yes, but you'll find one or more of his biographies in any bookshop here in France. Which are his best works.

>>22914556
Total meme tier. He might have a few contrarian literature professors fans. Probably best known for having a dock named after him in Paris back when he was still read.

>>22920912
>Rabelais but does anyone really read him anymore
Here he is by literate people, and I still had to read Gargantua in high school.
>Erasmus
Also read, he had some luxury edition of the Adagia recently which is great but the Praise of Foly is also basic reading and on college reading list.

>>22922195
Scot is rarely read but not forgotten. Anyone interesting in literature knows his name.

Now if you want the true contrast of peak literature (and soul) to contemporary oblivion, you can look at the orators of the Grand Siecle. Bossuet has more or less painfully survived (fortunately because he's the goat as in numero uno single one) but Bourdaloue, Massillon, Fléchier, Fénelon, etc might as well have never existed.

[Anonymous No.22927122]

>>22926870
>This probably plays a part. the man was openly pro-fascist, plus a brazen white supremacist, pro-soviet Stalin apologist but at the same time an ardent ultra-feminist cheering for matriarchal mommydom then looping it with old school hardcore negative eugenism and sprinkled with total nationalisation-socialization welfare statism. It's like he was trolling to get everyone against him but every witness vouch for his genuineness in all of this.
He's so fucking me.

I don't think his politicals have anything to do with his consignment to the dustbin of literary history. The fact is that his work is dull, uninnovative and overwrought. Victorian melodrama is more engaging today.

[Anonymous No.22927131]

>>22913932
>no Harry Crews
So forgotten he didn't even make that list. A lot of his books have gone out of print (save for a few where the rights were picked up by smaller publishers).

[Anonymous No.22927137]

>>22927131
So fucking forgotten that 5,000 dimwits love his feast of snakes

[Anonymous No.22927294]

>>22914292
>However, the general critical response was less positive. In the 27 years since Caine's great success of The Manxman, literary tastes had moved on and his didactic and melodramatic style was now distinctly out of fashion. This was put starkly in a review in The North American Review, where it was noted that "the sentiment aroused by the story depends in large measure upon an arbitrary and unreal contrast between Stowell's character and the things he does and suffers," and that "the novel as a whole is condemned by its sham inevitableness and its reckless idealizations." Caine's modern biographer observes that even just the central plot point of Victor Stowell becoming Deemster "seems so unlikely as to vitiate the story at its central point."

[Anonymous No.22927378]

>>22920849
>Jean Paul Richter
Was about to mention him.

[Anonymous No.22927379]

>>22927137
>5000
Not that many
>feast of snakes
Pretty much his easiest book to find.

[Anonymous No.22927635]

good ass thread bros

[Anonymous No.22927647]

>>22914080
Assuming you mean C.S. Lewis, I don’t think he’ll fade yet due to Narnia, it’ll keep his name around even if most (including me desu) don’t end up reading his “mature” work. He’s about as known as a 20th century writer can hope to be at this point.

[Anonymous No.22927662]

>>22927635
The contingent of /lit/ that actually reads is pretty well versed in their specific niches. I'd also put money on many anons growing up with a shelf full of full of some generation or another of these writers or having had to wade through their mentions in critical texts and histories.

Which reminds me, I haven't looked into what this guy has been up to since 2003.

[Anonymous No.22927676]

>>22927647
Considering he was talking about Americans, I think it's Sinclair Lewis, who received a Nobel Prize in Literature.

[Anonymous No.22927691]

>>22926769
I doubt anybody here read any of his books. He's barely known even in literary circles.

[Anonymous No.22927698]

>>22927379
Retard

[Anonymous No.22927765]

>>22927676
>>22914080
>Sinclair Lewis,

>The Sinclair Lewis novel "It Can't Happen Here," about a gradual fascist takeover of the United States, has joined George Orwell's "1984" on Amazon's list of its best-selling books.

>The spike in sales is, at least in part, a reaction to the Trump presidency.

>Lower down on the book seller's list are the dystopian classics "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood, "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury, and "Animal Farm," also by Orwell. Trump's "The Art of the Deal" is also on the list, at #12 on Saturday afternoon.

>"It Can't Happen Here" broke into the top 100 on Amazon's updated-every-hour list of sales several days ago. On Saturday it surged into the top 10.

[Anonymous No.22928263]

>>22926723
OP didn't even mention any book, retard.

[Anonymous No.22928817]

>>22913901
What are you on? He has his own Netflix documentary. That's as mainstream of a reputation as you could get.

[Anonymous No.22928823]

>>22928263
Retard

[Anonymous No.22928837]

>>22927131
Penguin publishes a book of his

[Anonymous No.22929044]

>>22913874
>Irvin s. Cobb
> journalist and author who covered several historical events (assassination of Kentucky Governor William Goebel, peace conference of Russian-Japanese peace conference, and the Harlem hellfighters --- which gained an audience of more than two million readers)
>coined the term sob sister when he covered the murder of Harry Kendall Thaw
> two movie adapted his judge priest character, both directed by renowned director John ford
>acted in movies and even hosted the 7th academy awards
>his story fishhead was an inspiration for Lovecraft's shadow over innsmouth
>his book red likker has made bourbon a staple to Kentucky culture

[Anonymous No.22929143]

>>22925448
He's also underrated for everything outside of his SF. Like, Wheels of Chance is an amazingly comfy novel, but it's overshadowed by Invisible Man and War of the Worlds. Even The Mysterious Visitor, which has fantasy elements, is overlooked.

[Anonymous No.22929146]

>>22913874
Peter Taylor

[Anonymous No.22929287]

>>22929143
Yeah, he wrote tons of fiction and nonfiction but he is only remembered for his handful of science fiction books

[Anonymous No.22929304]

Poul Anderson. He wrote sci-fi and fantasy mainly. I think being named Poul instead of Paul is partially to blame lol

[Anonymous No.22929743]

>>22929304
Poul Anderson was bad, and he's not exactly that unknown either.

[Anonymous No.22929780]

>>22913874
I collect old Franklin Library books and it’s funny to see how most of the MUST READ elite authors as they made those lists in the 70s have died off completely from public consciousness.
Grab lists like the pulizer prize winners and consider how many you know and how many you’ve known someone to mention or read.

>>22913901
He’s still mentioned sometimes. Not gone but definitely deflated from where he was. I like his historical novels.

[Anonymous No.22929791]

>>22927662
> growing up with a shelf full of full of some generation or another of these writers
Definitely. Reading parents who read “hot” literary fiction plus collected classics. Their book collections are 20-30 years out of date relative to you reaching reading age. You get references that are a generation out of date.

[Anonymous No.22930698]

>>22929791
Between my own random grabs off the basement shelves and what you find in estate stores, it's a little disheartening to see how much more...at the very least, middlebrow, and common reading was. I wouldn't call it culturally defining past the 60s but keeping up with hot novels and curating a small personal library of your own interests was part of the social order at one time. Whether Rabbit, Run or some truly obscure and past their shelf life southern writers was a thing a 15 year old should be reading is another story.

[Anonymous No.22930786]

>>22913932
> 13 less forgotten than 11 (whose name isn’t even in the list)

[Anonymous No.22930840]

>>22930698
huh?

[Anonymous No.22930877]

>>22913874
Ancient philosophy aside from Plato and Aristotle. Even more so medieval philosophy.

It's shocking how many new movements and ideas are just recapitulations of old ideas. The whole deflationary view of truth and post-modernism is getting torn apart by Plato in the Protagoras and Gorgias. Semiotic views of nature and culture, semiosis as a way of recovering metaphysical realism, the hot topic of so many new continental works? Medievals were all over that. While I love C.S. Pierce, his "ground breaking," tripartite semiotics was done by Augustine over a millennia earlier and his extension of it into the mind and through the natural world was done by Poinsot during the Reformation.

Hegelian dialectical? In many ways it is tremendously innovative, but the seeds are there in Augustine and even more in Eriugena.

Medieval thought is a gold mine for "new" ideas because of this at least, so I can't complain.

Anti-Christian sentiment and a vast overestimation of how damaging Kant's critique of metaphysics is to prior thought is most responsible.

Practical and moral philosophy is definitely stronger in the ancient/medieval writers. It is very weird how the West has consumed so much Eastern spiritual practice, trying to secularized it and westernize it, while completely forgetting it has this massive historical tradition of meditation, mindfulness, and contemplation. Hell, the monastic orders focused on this like the Cistercians still exist. But there is definitely a Jesusphobia that makes it easier to adapt Zen or Hindu practice.

[Anonymous No.22930887]

>>22930877
Yeye but do you have any specific names and titles we can look into. Far more interesting. We already know about the concept of authors being forgotten but can you name some interesting ones perhaps.

[Anonymous No.22930904]

>>22914324
>Very few authors ever willed themselves into becoming legends. Tolstoy is an anomaly in modern times.
What do you mean by that?

[Anonymous No.22931111]

>>22926728
>Baudelaire

[Anonymous No.22931340]

>>22930904
Tolstoy became a literary legend within his own lifetime and ensured that his name wouldn't be forgotten. This rarely ever happens. Most great authors are discovered after their deaths. Even literary celebrities are known to fall from grace after they die as this thread has shown.

[Anonymous No.22931344]

>>22931340
I see

[Anonymous No.22931444]

>>22927691
Guess I'll pick a random book then.

[Anonymous No.22932453]

I wonder if people in 100 years will be saying the same about Grisham, Crichton and Koontz.

[Anonymous No.22932508]

>>22932453
Crichton>Grisham>>>>>>>Koontz in 100yrs time for their relative relevance

[Anonymous No.22932521]

>>22932508
No argument there, but I do wonder how Crichton will hold up in the realm of pulpy sci fi he's known for.

[Anonymous No.22932524]

>>22932508
I'd agree. Although it pains me to think King might end up being the most relevant of the bunch 100 years from now.

[Anonymous No.22932534]

>>22913874
I forget

[Anonymous No.22932550]

>>22932524
I swear this isn't blind optimism, I don't think he has a tenth of the relevance he once held and the books he'll be remembered for are going to be few. I'm probably off the mark but I don't see him as being perennial outside of a handful of books that may not be what he's best known for currently.

[Anonymous No.22932570]

Tarkington is probably the best example I can think of, perhaps because of how quickly and significantly he faded into obscurity. He was not only one of the most popular American writers in his era, but he was also one of the most respected by the educated and his fellow writers. In that sense he even one-upped Twain, another American writer of great celebrity in his day. But unlike Twain, in just two or three generations he became a footnote in the history of American letters.

[Anonymous No.22932573]

>>22914376
Carlyle is big in the neoreactionary sphere, Curtis Yarvin mentions him a lot, along with Ruskin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdiMnJeR5ZM
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/based-ruskin

[Anonymous No.22932579]

Search Library of America’s books. Lots of good answers. As an anon mentioned above, who is Peter Taylor? There is a box set of him. At least Tarkington and Dreiser are famous for being forgotten. Also how is Mary McCarthys popularity these days? What about Singer’s?

[Anonymous No.22932585]

>>22914032
This is on a vegan restaurant near my home. I would say most normal people can recognise him.

[Anonymous No.22932593]

His name is still well known, but I feel like people don't really read Rudyard Kipling anymore, and instead just see him as a symbol of British colonialism.

[Anonymous No.22932606]

>>22927662
He got lucky with one book and was coasting off it for a while but as the years pass it became increasingly he was one hit wonder. Well truth most people never get to experience even that much

[Anonymous No.22932637]

>>22921956
"Cream of the Jest" is an all time great book title however, pay the man his respects

[Anonymous No.22932685]

>>22932573
Yeah and the neoreactionary sphere is irrelevant. Yarvin is essentially an internet meme.

[Anonymous No.22932692]

John Fowles is the king

[Anonymous No.22932693]

>>22914258
I'm suspicious of anyone who reaches the popularity of pop stars and footballers. Sounds like someone who writes for the lowest common denominator.

[Anonymous No.22932869]

>>22932692
Both the magus and the collector are pretty well known. A relative normie at work told me that the magus was her favourite book

[Anonymous No.22932921]

OP here, great thread fellas let's work to make sure most threads on this board aren't complete dogshit and are good like this one

[Anonymous No.22932943]

>>22932921
Whelp thread ruined with OP faggotry. It was good while it lasted.