You cited Kafka's and Melville's literary fame coming decades after their deaths and another, even more extreme, example came to mind. Dante was respected in his lifetime, but after that his work took a backseat and Petrarch became the paradigmatic italian author, and his language became the starting point for the construction of the italian language. Centuries later the romantics became interested in Dante's work and now he is THE italian author.
Another great example! Reminds me of how Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson was THE English playwright for a while after their deaths until Shakespeare's star rose and surpassed him to become THE English writer.
Great post! Thoughtful & informative. I've played a variant on this 'game' in other realms, e.g., sports. As in: name some competitors at the 1924 Paris Olympics who were NOT featured in the 1981 film 'Chariots of Fire' (which re-boosted them; and which itself is growing more obscure each year).
Funny anecdote: Chariots of Fire was extremely popular with American Evangelicals in the '80s because of the protagonist's refusal to run on Sundays (and IIRC he went on to be a Protestant missionary after retiring from sport). One of the few movies some of us were allowed to watch. :)
Decades before I became a Christian, I loved that film... but cheered for all the 'wrong' guys. Doubly ironic: it was made by a Muslim (the late Dodi Al Fayed) for the grander purpose of analogizing his family's struggle for acceptance in Britain to earlier Jewish assimilation. All of those ironies keep piling up.
I’ve read a lot of Zane Grey as a kid and i’m not that old yet. But it was all in Serbian translation, so some authors get remembered in other cultures than the one of origin.
Yes, that's a great point too. True in the moment as well. Sometimes American bands are bigger in Japan and American authors bigger in France, for example.
Obviously nobody knows what the future will hold... But I'm honestly not optimistic that any books from this era are going to endure or make a posthumous splash for a mainstream audience unless *books themselves* make a major cultural resurgence. As you mentioned, one of the main ways we rediscover works from the past is because future creators cite them as an influence. Who is going to be influenced by the contemporary authors that no one reads? Future authors that no one reads?
Honestly, I think even those future authors are more likely to be influenced by other contemporary forms of narrative media that, even at their most obscure or underground, are easier to passively consume or entertainingly analyze (thinking here of film, television and video games, which are far better suited to video essays and let's plays and the community discussions those spark, or of podcasts, which don't require a dedicated and focused time commitment for the listener in even the same way an audiobook typically does), older works of literature that have already sunk into the popular consciousness, or adaptations. Regardless of the medium they themselves are working in, artists are usually most influenced by what they consume the most often and in the greatest quantities.
I also think that in general, at least in my lifetime, we see art forms going from "low" to "high" culture in the way that they're produced and received and revisited. Rock and pop music, comic books, street art, etc. -- what for one generation was a form of youthful rebellion and/or entertainment becomes highly regarded and auteur in the next. Literary fiction is more akin to contemporary classical music: it appeals mostly to an older, super niche, and highly educated audience, and thus isn't as sexy or prime for rediscovery. (It's unlikely you'll see chamber music composed in the 1980s popping up on today's Spotify top 50.)
Maybe/hopefully I'm wrong about all of this. But I feel it's more likely that our next Herman Melville or John Kennedy Toole will be a posthumously successful filmmaker or game designer than a novelist.
I think that's all correct, sadly. I kind of blur the line talking about literature and then genres/styles across mediums here... but I agree that a lot of novels today seem more influenced by TV and film than they are by older authors. Again, sadly.
I suppose a mildly hopeful counterpoint is that literature remains the source material for a lot of other mediums. Game of Thrones, Rings of Powers, Harry Potter, Dune, etc. (plus plenty of other works that aren't at that level of mega popularity.) Perhaps that points to an endurance for novels? Not that many readers, but still a source for bigger more collaborative artistic mediums.
I'm reaching a bit here but I do think one---perhaps small--advantage novels have over say film and video games is a timelessness to the medium. A novel from 50 years ago can be read by a casual reader today without much friction. OTOH, a lot of younger people seem unable to watch old movies. Not just silent era stuff but even from say the 70s. (As a professor, I got more pushback for showing a movie from the early 90s than teaching essays from hundreds of years ago).
So, in the future I fully expect film / video games to endure but possibly in some technologically advanced way (virtual reality games say) that render something like a pixelated 1990s Super Mario video game or Hollywood blockbuster more archaic than a 1990s novel. Perhaps more people will read 90s authors than watch 90s movies in 100 years. Though the number will surely be small....
Also just to be clear I'm not ragging on current "young people." The same was true of my generation. My friends and I played video games but were not seeking out old Atari systems. We did watch a lot of movies from the 70s-80s, especially since they played on TV for free, but were hardly seeking out old black and white films much less silent era stuff.
I imagine if we had something like Netflix, most of us would also have avoided most older films.
This is totally a tangent and I might be in the minority here... But in college I watched a lot of older movies, even including silent ones. One reason was there was an international film course offered every semester, and even people like me who never took it for credit went to the free screenings all the time. So I'm always surprised when young people aren't willing to watch, say, black and white movies.
(however, this may have been the result more of going to school in rural Vermont and not even having a car to get off campus... than profound open-mindedness or media literacy lol)
yeah when there were less options we all were more open minded, when it comes to media I think! I remember reading a lot ~10 years ago about how Netflix was phasing out all its old classics--one of the big selling points during the DVD days--because basically no one watched them in the streaming era.
The transition from DVD-by-mail (which had the DEEPEST catalog) to streaming-first at Netflix was a sad and frustrating process. I didn't watch a lot of stuff off the beaten path, but the odd international film or what have you that I wanted to revisit was suddenly unavailable anywhere.
And I blame it on some manager wanting to maximize utilization of inventory.
Respectfully, I think you *are* totally wrong here. (OK, fine, you're right on the money on paragraphs 2 and 3 here.) But I just don't think that there physically *can* be a Melville of video game designers - the medium is just increasingly not built for longevity, especially as we move from physical cartridges with storage space measured in megabytes to big-ass digital files hosted on Steam servers. We do occasionally have filmmakers whose oeuvres are reevaluated or rediscovered decades after their deaths, but there are plenty of silent-era films that just don't exist anymore because the negatives were melted down to make shoes or whatever.
I'm not saying it's *likely* we'll have a Rachelcuskaissance in 2124, but text as a medium is so trivial to reproduce that it *could* happen. I don't know that anyone would *want* to play Cyberpunk 2077 in 2077, but I'm particularly doubtful that you *could* play a video game from today fifty years from now even if you wanted to.
I just assume tech (like emulators, etc.) will continue to advance while attention spans and long form reading comprehension attenuate... but that's total speculation on my part. So what you're saying is equally plausible, it just doesn't match my pessimistic mood atm :-)
Attention spans are increasing. See the popularity of podcasts and youtube lectures. Video games last many hours longer than film. The film and literary worlds have become ossified and stale. The creativity has moved on to greener pastures, but the boomers in the literary world never noticed. Google "Brandon Sanderson." The guy is going direct to consumer for fiction, gaming, comics,..., and it is working. George RR Martin writes in a style that was once popular, and it is actually fun to read.
With film, who knows? It seems like the gatekeepers today are completely out of touch. Disney is a glaring case in point. It is difficult to believe that they once knew what they were doing. Take away their Star Wars films and they would be a rusting hulk attached to a them park.
I think part of the answer is that authors/filmmakers/“creators” in general tend to be a little on the weird side, and so are more likely to read books in general, and obscure books in particular) going forward. We’ve already seen a vinyl renaissance in music because, while the vast majority of people stopped listening to vinyl when CDs came around, a lot of musicians (from multiple genres!) continued to listen to vinyl, made sure their work remained available on vinyl, and even incorporated the act of listening to the new music they were creating (record scratching, create digging). And now 40 years later we’ve completely reversed and nothing gets released on CD anymore, but Target has a whole vinyl aisle. This is hopefulness on my part, but there’s no reason the same thing couldn’t happen for paper books. Already you can see that e-readers have mostly come and gone.
I just recently rewatched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the one with the whales) with my family and I kept thinking about a joke in it where Spock is asking Kirk about why he’s started swearing. Kirk responds with something like “you’ll find it in the literature of the time” and then cites the collected works of Jacqueline Susanne and novels of Harold Robbins. And now your piece has me wondering how many people younger than thirty will even get those references.
I think even some of these "forgotten" books are unevenly forgotten, in that they sometimes have small cults or show up in nonliterary contexts, e.g. high school curricula.
One of those 1967 NBA nominees, Office Politics, is actually being reprinted by McNally this September. The author, Wilfrid Sheed, seems to be in the midst of rediscovery: His novels The Hack and Max Jamison have some fans in the more literary corners of book Twitter.
Re: The 1967 bestsellers, Chaim Potok's The Chosen was on the high school curriculum at my school. Another book by Thornton Wilder, author of The Eighth Day, was also on the curriculum!
As regards Marsh's The Beetle: I don't think it's entirely forgotten, since it was actually on the syllabus for a course I took in college in the mid-2000s. Though Marsh's greatest legacy, I think, is his grandson, the great writer of weird stories Robert Aickman!
Yes, agree all this stuff is unevenly forgotten and books that are forgotten can be reprinted and revived again (e.g., how Stoner seems to have become big recently)
Jane Tompkins has a really good essay in her book Sensational Designs, where she goes into how appraisals of Hawthorne have changed over time. (IIRC, contemporaries liked his sentimentality, whereas the 20th century reappraisal tended to ignore a lot of those most-loved sentimental sketches.)
Also, people sometimes say that Lovecraft's work was kept going in the 1980s in part to the RPG Call of Cthulhu. I wonder how that could be traced/proven?
Interesting and thoughtful . Dickens perhaps a counter example though - I don't think I read him just because he was a set book at school (where I hated Gt Expectations). Or because of Sarah Waters / Leon Garfield.
The novel's only been around for a couple of hundred years - I see cinema as the defining storytelling art form of now (as stage plays were in the 1590s). And the Godfather films are much better than Puzo's original novel. Shakespeare's plays were also based on existing literary works in moribund genres like Holinshed's Chronicles.
In 100 years? Well plenty of us are enjoying early Hitchcock from the 1930s. 'The 39 Steps' is 90 years old (and very little beholden to John Buchan's novel.)
As you refer to Kafka, now receiving renewed attention due to the centenary of his death, I am reminded of Conrad, another giant, whom it would be a sin to forget. In 1902, an anonymous reviewer from the Manchester Guardian, while commenting on two works by Joseph Conrad—a reprint of "Heart of Darkness" (1899) and the newly published "Youth"—concluded his article by stating that 'it would be futile to pretend that these books could achieve wide circulation.'
And don't forget F. Scott, virtually unread when he died in 1940. The US govt saved him by including Gatsby in the paperbacks supplied to soldiers in World War II. From there to high school curricula.....He might even have stopped drinking if he lived to see it.
A couple of years ago I gave a gift to a friend who was celebrating the centenary of her mother's birth. I chose The Velveteen Rabbit, Jacob's Room, Siddhartha, The Waste Land, The Beautiful and The Damned and The Garden Party. There were so many more I could have gone for. I thought Ulysses and a volume of Proust might not get read but I regretted not including Just William!
Hesse's Siddhartha was the first book I read in another language. It was transformative. I remember being lost, divorced, unemployed and suffering withdrawal in a monastery in a jungle in Thailand, and some how that book came back to me. I still attend a Thai Wat here in Chicago. Hesse does not get the credit he deserves.
Hi, I read 'Call of the Canyon' last month! My grandad loved Zane Grey, he died 30 years ago, but his old books were lying around so I chose that one. I also picked up Comptom Mackenzie's 'Whisky Galore' another popular book in it's time.
I've never read Potter or the Hunger Games but despair when young people think that is all there is to literature.
My personal favourite of this circumstance is Damon Runyon. A newspaper columnist and short story writer whose name could literally boost sales. Twenty movies made from his stories. It's not quite clear to historians how much his stories popularized the "tough guy gangster slang" we all know from movies etc, and how much he actually created and the tough guys then emulated.
Yet, in a lifelong hunt for collections of his stories, I've had one, and only one, used book store owner recognize "Damon Runyon" when queried. Fellow readers of books likewise provide blank stares.
You cited Kafka's and Melville's literary fame coming decades after their deaths and another, even more extreme, example came to mind. Dante was respected in his lifetime, but after that his work took a backseat and Petrarch became the paradigmatic italian author, and his language became the starting point for the construction of the italian language. Centuries later the romantics became interested in Dante's work and now he is THE italian author.
Another great example! Reminds me of how Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson was THE English playwright for a while after their deaths until Shakespeare's star rose and surpassed him to become THE English writer.
Ben Johnson on the other hand praised Shakespeare as a writer "not of an age, but for all time."
😬 I haven’t even heard of Ben Johnson…
ha well promise I’m not making him up! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Jonson#Reception_and_influence
Perhaps that’s because his name was Ben Jonson.
Great post! Thoughtful & informative. I've played a variant on this 'game' in other realms, e.g., sports. As in: name some competitors at the 1924 Paris Olympics who were NOT featured in the 1981 film 'Chariots of Fire' (which re-boosted them; and which itself is growing more obscure each year).
Funny anecdote: Chariots of Fire was extremely popular with American Evangelicals in the '80s because of the protagonist's refusal to run on Sundays (and IIRC he went on to be a Protestant missionary after retiring from sport). One of the few movies some of us were allowed to watch. :)
Decades before I became a Christian, I loved that film... but cheered for all the 'wrong' guys. Doubly ironic: it was made by a Muslim (the late Dodi Al Fayed) for the grander purpose of analogizing his family's struggle for acceptance in Britain to earlier Jewish assimilation. All of those ironies keep piling up.
I’ve read a lot of Zane Grey as a kid and i’m not that old yet. But it was all in Serbian translation, so some authors get remembered in other cultures than the one of origin.
Yes, that's a great point too. True in the moment as well. Sometimes American bands are bigger in Japan and American authors bigger in France, for example.
Obviously nobody knows what the future will hold... But I'm honestly not optimistic that any books from this era are going to endure or make a posthumous splash for a mainstream audience unless *books themselves* make a major cultural resurgence. As you mentioned, one of the main ways we rediscover works from the past is because future creators cite them as an influence. Who is going to be influenced by the contemporary authors that no one reads? Future authors that no one reads?
Honestly, I think even those future authors are more likely to be influenced by other contemporary forms of narrative media that, even at their most obscure or underground, are easier to passively consume or entertainingly analyze (thinking here of film, television and video games, which are far better suited to video essays and let's plays and the community discussions those spark, or of podcasts, which don't require a dedicated and focused time commitment for the listener in even the same way an audiobook typically does), older works of literature that have already sunk into the popular consciousness, or adaptations. Regardless of the medium they themselves are working in, artists are usually most influenced by what they consume the most often and in the greatest quantities.
I also think that in general, at least in my lifetime, we see art forms going from "low" to "high" culture in the way that they're produced and received and revisited. Rock and pop music, comic books, street art, etc. -- what for one generation was a form of youthful rebellion and/or entertainment becomes highly regarded and auteur in the next. Literary fiction is more akin to contemporary classical music: it appeals mostly to an older, super niche, and highly educated audience, and thus isn't as sexy or prime for rediscovery. (It's unlikely you'll see chamber music composed in the 1980s popping up on today's Spotify top 50.)
Maybe/hopefully I'm wrong about all of this. But I feel it's more likely that our next Herman Melville or John Kennedy Toole will be a posthumously successful filmmaker or game designer than a novelist.
I think that's all correct, sadly. I kind of blur the line talking about literature and then genres/styles across mediums here... but I agree that a lot of novels today seem more influenced by TV and film than they are by older authors. Again, sadly.
I suppose a mildly hopeful counterpoint is that literature remains the source material for a lot of other mediums. Game of Thrones, Rings of Powers, Harry Potter, Dune, etc. (plus plenty of other works that aren't at that level of mega popularity.) Perhaps that points to an endurance for novels? Not that many readers, but still a source for bigger more collaborative artistic mediums.
I'm reaching a bit here but I do think one---perhaps small--advantage novels have over say film and video games is a timelessness to the medium. A novel from 50 years ago can be read by a casual reader today without much friction. OTOH, a lot of younger people seem unable to watch old movies. Not just silent era stuff but even from say the 70s. (As a professor, I got more pushback for showing a movie from the early 90s than teaching essays from hundreds of years ago).
So, in the future I fully expect film / video games to endure but possibly in some technologically advanced way (virtual reality games say) that render something like a pixelated 1990s Super Mario video game or Hollywood blockbuster more archaic than a 1990s novel. Perhaps more people will read 90s authors than watch 90s movies in 100 years. Though the number will surely be small....
Also just to be clear I'm not ragging on current "young people." The same was true of my generation. My friends and I played video games but were not seeking out old Atari systems. We did watch a lot of movies from the 70s-80s, especially since they played on TV for free, but were hardly seeking out old black and white films much less silent era stuff.
I imagine if we had something like Netflix, most of us would also have avoided most older films.
This is totally a tangent and I might be in the minority here... But in college I watched a lot of older movies, even including silent ones. One reason was there was an international film course offered every semester, and even people like me who never took it for credit went to the free screenings all the time. So I'm always surprised when young people aren't willing to watch, say, black and white movies.
(however, this may have been the result more of going to school in rural Vermont and not even having a car to get off campus... than profound open-mindedness or media literacy lol)
yeah when there were less options we all were more open minded, when it comes to media I think! I remember reading a lot ~10 years ago about how Netflix was phasing out all its old classics--one of the big selling points during the DVD days--because basically no one watched them in the streaming era.
Ugh, that makes me so sad.
The transition from DVD-by-mail (which had the DEEPEST catalog) to streaming-first at Netflix was a sad and frustrating process. I didn't watch a lot of stuff off the beaten path, but the odd international film or what have you that I wanted to revisit was suddenly unavailable anywhere.
And I blame it on some manager wanting to maximize utilization of inventory.
I am not so sure. I know young guys, and they know all the 1990's greats, and even some of the 1970's.
Respectfully, I think you *are* totally wrong here. (OK, fine, you're right on the money on paragraphs 2 and 3 here.) But I just don't think that there physically *can* be a Melville of video game designers - the medium is just increasingly not built for longevity, especially as we move from physical cartridges with storage space measured in megabytes to big-ass digital files hosted on Steam servers. We do occasionally have filmmakers whose oeuvres are reevaluated or rediscovered decades after their deaths, but there are plenty of silent-era films that just don't exist anymore because the negatives were melted down to make shoes or whatever.
I'm not saying it's *likely* we'll have a Rachelcuskaissance in 2124, but text as a medium is so trivial to reproduce that it *could* happen. I don't know that anyone would *want* to play Cyberpunk 2077 in 2077, but I'm particularly doubtful that you *could* play a video game from today fifty years from now even if you wanted to.
I just assume tech (like emulators, etc.) will continue to advance while attention spans and long form reading comprehension attenuate... but that's total speculation on my part. So what you're saying is equally plausible, it just doesn't match my pessimistic mood atm :-)
Attention spans are increasing. See the popularity of podcasts and youtube lectures. Video games last many hours longer than film. The film and literary worlds have become ossified and stale. The creativity has moved on to greener pastures, but the boomers in the literary world never noticed. Google "Brandon Sanderson." The guy is going direct to consumer for fiction, gaming, comics,..., and it is working. George RR Martin writes in a style that was once popular, and it is actually fun to read.
With film, who knows? It seems like the gatekeepers today are completely out of touch. Disney is a glaring case in point. It is difficult to believe that they once knew what they were doing. Take away their Star Wars films and they would be a rusting hulk attached to a them park.
I think part of the answer is that authors/filmmakers/“creators” in general tend to be a little on the weird side, and so are more likely to read books in general, and obscure books in particular) going forward. We’ve already seen a vinyl renaissance in music because, while the vast majority of people stopped listening to vinyl when CDs came around, a lot of musicians (from multiple genres!) continued to listen to vinyl, made sure their work remained available on vinyl, and even incorporated the act of listening to the new music they were creating (record scratching, create digging). And now 40 years later we’ve completely reversed and nothing gets released on CD anymore, but Target has a whole vinyl aisle. This is hopefulness on my part, but there’s no reason the same thing couldn’t happen for paper books. Already you can see that e-readers have mostly come and gone.
CD's are still released.
I just recently rewatched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the one with the whales) with my family and I kept thinking about a joke in it where Spock is asking Kirk about why he’s started swearing. Kirk responds with something like “you’ll find it in the literature of the time” and then cites the collected works of Jacqueline Susanne and novels of Harold Robbins. And now your piece has me wondering how many people younger than thirty will even get those references.
But in the future people can just guess “James Patterson” and be right on half the bestsellers from our era. 🤦♀️
I think even some of these "forgotten" books are unevenly forgotten, in that they sometimes have small cults or show up in nonliterary contexts, e.g. high school curricula.
One of those 1967 NBA nominees, Office Politics, is actually being reprinted by McNally this September. The author, Wilfrid Sheed, seems to be in the midst of rediscovery: His novels The Hack and Max Jamison have some fans in the more literary corners of book Twitter.
Re: The 1967 bestsellers, Chaim Potok's The Chosen was on the high school curriculum at my school. Another book by Thornton Wilder, author of The Eighth Day, was also on the curriculum!
As regards Marsh's The Beetle: I don't think it's entirely forgotten, since it was actually on the syllabus for a course I took in college in the mid-2000s. Though Marsh's greatest legacy, I think, is his grandson, the great writer of weird stories Robert Aickman!
Oh wow, I did not know that about Aickman!
Yes, agree all this stuff is unevenly forgotten and books that are forgotten can be reprinted and revived again (e.g., how Stoner seems to have become big recently)
This was fantastic to read and must have been quite an undertaking to research. Thanks for sharing with us!
Jane Tompkins has a really good essay in her book Sensational Designs, where she goes into how appraisals of Hawthorne have changed over time. (IIRC, contemporaries liked his sentimentality, whereas the 20th century reappraisal tended to ignore a lot of those most-loved sentimental sketches.)
Also, people sometimes say that Lovecraft's work was kept going in the 1980s in part to the RPG Call of Cthulhu. I wonder how that could be traced/proven?
Interesting and thoughtful . Dickens perhaps a counter example though - I don't think I read him just because he was a set book at school (where I hated Gt Expectations). Or because of Sarah Waters / Leon Garfield.
The novel's only been around for a couple of hundred years - I see cinema as the defining storytelling art form of now (as stage plays were in the 1590s). And the Godfather films are much better than Puzo's original novel. Shakespeare's plays were also based on existing literary works in moribund genres like Holinshed's Chronicles.
In 100 years? Well plenty of us are enjoying early Hitchcock from the 1930s. 'The 39 Steps' is 90 years old (and very little beholden to John Buchan's novel.)
As you refer to Kafka, now receiving renewed attention due to the centenary of his death, I am reminded of Conrad, another giant, whom it would be a sin to forget. In 1902, an anonymous reviewer from the Manchester Guardian, while commenting on two works by Joseph Conrad—a reprint of "Heart of Darkness" (1899) and the newly published "Youth"—concluded his article by stating that 'it would be futile to pretend that these books could achieve wide circulation.'
And don't forget F. Scott, virtually unread when he died in 1940. The US govt saved him by including Gatsby in the paperbacks supplied to soldiers in World War II. From there to high school curricula.....He might even have stopped drinking if he lived to see it.
Fingers crossed for one particular resurgence: Edna Ferber’s “So Big” blew me away with beautiful prose and enduring relevance.
A couple of years ago I gave a gift to a friend who was celebrating the centenary of her mother's birth. I chose The Velveteen Rabbit, Jacob's Room, Siddhartha, The Waste Land, The Beautiful and The Damned and The Garden Party. There were so many more I could have gone for. I thought Ulysses and a volume of Proust might not get read but I regretted not including Just William!
Hesse's Siddhartha was the first book I read in another language. It was transformative. I remember being lost, divorced, unemployed and suffering withdrawal in a monastery in a jungle in Thailand, and some how that book came back to me. I still attend a Thai Wat here in Chicago. Hesse does not get the credit he deserves.
Hi, I read 'Call of the Canyon' last month! My grandad loved Zane Grey, he died 30 years ago, but his old books were lying around so I chose that one. I also picked up Comptom Mackenzie's 'Whisky Galore' another popular book in it's time.
I've never read Potter or the Hunger Games but despair when young people think that is all there is to literature.
My personal favourite of this circumstance is Damon Runyon. A newspaper columnist and short story writer whose name could literally boost sales. Twenty movies made from his stories. It's not quite clear to historians how much his stories popularized the "tough guy gangster slang" we all know from movies etc, and how much he actually created and the tough guys then emulated.
Yet, in a lifelong hunt for collections of his stories, I've had one, and only one, used book store owner recognize "Damon Runyon" when queried. Fellow readers of books likewise provide blank stares.