Novelists No One Reads Anymore

_Another Peter de...

Does anyone read Peter de Vries any more?_

Good one! A friend once decided to lend me his copy of _Slouching Towards Kalamazoo_ which I eventually returned years later unread except for the first page or two.

Mrs. Alexander (Annie Hector)
Margaret Oliphant

Have read some Mrs. Oliphant, as she was credited in the anthologies where I found her---don't remember other particulars, but thought she was very good.

Mervyn Peake

oliphant still has several regular readers at my library (granted it's a strange one); have seen bennett, braddon, and gissing all go out too.

Some of the long-book high modernists -- Robert Musil, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos -- feel this way to me. Still famous, I think, but read?

has anyone not writing a disraeli biography read a beaconsfield novel?

Mervyn Peake

― the floor is guava (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, September 26, 2022 10:07 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

No way, I read Titus Groan just this year.

I still want to read Peake, also Gissing's New Grub Street, sounds v. relatable. Did read a lot of Dos Passos a few years ago, but seemed like would have been best read in high school (later confirmed by ILB founder Scott Seward). Enjoyed the Ford memoir I read, haven't gotten to the novels. Will read my copy of The Man Without Qualities when I can dig it up.

eephus' list are all authors I've thought I should read at some point or another and never did, so you might be onto something there (xp)

For some reason I read a couple of Sinclair Lewis books in high school (on my own, not for class). I was assigned Galsworthy in college, but it was his plays for a course on modern drama. A friend gave me a copy of Titus Groan not too long ago, so definitely not Peake.

Booth Tarkington, maybe?

Booth Tarkington is a GREAT one. Probably looking at old Pulitzer winners is a good way of finding likely candidates.

Sir Walter Scott was once the towering novelist in English, roughly equal in stature with Dickens.

Probably greater in stature actually.

I don't like Gissing, afraid he's often like "what if Dickens or Zola was a tory who hated poor people and thought they deserved all they got?"

Wanna read BT's The Magnificent Ambersons. (Just now finally got irony of family name btw.)

I did read Lewis's Kingsblood Royal: rising young pillar of a Minnesota community is urged by his daddy to investigate family tree, which may be like title says. Turns out key ancestor, whom they knew to be Canadian immigrant, was originally Haitian---Creole at least. Youngblood conceals findings from father, and self for a while, but eventually is told by out Black people of Minnesota race crimes, one of which (been so long, can't recall) may well be the Duluth lynching which some Minnesotans think is referenced in first verse of Duluth native's "Desolation Row." Novel, even by Nobel Prize winner, seems to be pushing envelope of late 40s, when civil rights was said by proto-McCarthyites and some others to be subject to Commie plots.

Robert Musil, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos

Musil recently had a minor revival with new translations coming out and I read Man Without Qualities several years back. I've read Ford's most famous novels, and thought his Parade's End trilogy much better than The Good Soldier. Every time I try to read anything of Dos Passos I bog down before I get to page 20.

I figure very religious novelists are less read today, like E.P. Roe who was hugely popular and is probably now just read by Christians.

I figure very religious novelists are less read today, like E.P. Roe who was hugely popular and is probably now just read by Christians.

― SincereLee 'Scratch' Perry (President Keyes)

oooh, how about lew wallace?

first one to come to mind was james branch cabell

do people read, like, james clavell? james a. michener? how about clive cussler, author of the extremely popular "dirk pitt" series of novels? how about don pendleton, whose character mack bolan, the executioner, was the inspiration for marvel comics' "punisher", and is really the guy cops _should_ be celebrating?

J.F. Powers?

Thought Powers got revived by NYRB.

I bet Executioner books are still read by gun show types

99% sure my dad still reads clive cussler

I'll see your James Michener and raise you Herman Fucking Wouk

"Historians, novelists, publishers, and critics who gathered at the Library of Congress in 1995 to mark Wouk's 80th birthday described him as an American Tolstoy.[2]"

Feel like the most canonical answers so far are

Arnold Bennett
George Meredith
James Branch Cabell

I even seem to remember something the subject of the original post said about Meredith, have to go look for it.

Of course all the other answers are welcome as well, although some authors that have been named seem to have had recent enough revivals to be disqualified, such as Mervyn Peake, as someone has already brought up.

Meredith mentioned here:

Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

Doesn’t work on zing though

Bernard DeVoto
A.B. Guthrie Jr.

^these two were on the reading list of The Other (Honors?) English Class one summer in high school so I checked them out at the time but don’t think I have heard much mention of them since.

I read a George Meredith book last week!

Which?

btw, James, I didn't know this thread was for obscurities we hadn't read.

It was Beauchamp’s Career. I liked it.

those sound like worthy lost authors, but I haven't heard of any of them

I've been thinking about more pedestrian works

Years ago I loved Len Deighton's espionage trilogies - Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match, and also Spy Hook, Spy Line, Spy Sinker and Faith, Hope, Charity. Looking him up today I'm surprised to read that he is still alive

I just looked to see when the Mack Bolan the Executioner series ended. 2020!

Yeah, a lot of popular spy novelists from the 50s/60s not named Ian Fleming or John Le Carre are pretty obscure these days.

Oliver Optic

ok I guess, not sure what you're mad about

Leon Uris maybe too obvious but also maybe I missed the Uris revival. James Clavell already noted. I kind of think those types of novelists who wrote those astronomically long works which inevitably were turned into eight hour mini series are perfect for this thread. John Jakes!

Which?

btw, James, I didn't know this thread was for obscurities we hadn't read.

Although now that I look, some of the names mentioned (even by me) are still in print. But still in print is one thing. Being in print plus the cachet of a new edition with foreword by Michael Moorcock like a recent edition of Titus Alone I just got is another thing.

But the cover says the intro is by another guy, David Louis Edelman.

Booth Tarkington is a GREAT one. Probably looking at old Pulitzer winners is a good way of finding likely candidates.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Monday, September 26, 2022 5:00 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

There was a good New Yorker article a couple of years ago about Tarkington's changing reputation. Here's how it begins:

A trick question: Can you name the only three writers who have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice? Faulkner, yes; Updike. And? Hats off if you came up with Booth Tarkington. And yet his two prize-winners—“The Magnificent Ambersons” and “Alice Adams,” just reissued in one volume by the Library of America—are not even the most commercially successful novels of his extraordinarily successful career. Nine of his books were ranked among the top ten sellers of their year (up there, pre-Stephen King, with Zane Grey and Mary Roberts Rinehart), and the outlandishly dissimilar “The Turmoil” and “Seventeen” were the No. 1 sellers in consecutive years. And then there’s “Penrod,” probably the most beloved boys’ book since Tom and Huck, though I can’t recommend a stroll down that particular memory lane.

There are thirty or so novels, countless short stories and serials, a string of hit plays. And there were countless honors: Tarkington was not only commercial but literary—not just the Pulitzers but in 1933 the gold medal for fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells had won previously. As early as 1922, the Times had placed him twelfth (and the only writer) on a list of the twelve greatest contemporary American men. “Yes, I got in as last on the Times list,” Tarkington commented. “What darn silliness! You can demonstrate who are the 10 fattest people in a country and who are the 27 tallest . . . but you can’t say who are the 10 greatest with any more authority than you can say who are the 13 damndest fools.”

As for booksellers, in 1921 they voted him the most significant contemporary American writer. (Wharton came in second. Robert Frost? Thirteenth. Theodore Dreiser? Fourteenth. Eugene O’Neill? Twenty-sixth.) Nothing ever changes. Some forty years earlier, a comparable poll ranked E. P. Roe and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth at Nos. 1 and 2, with scores of votes each. At the bottom of the list—with two votes—came Herman Melville.

How to explain this remarkable career—the meteoric ascent to fame, the impregnable reputation over several decades, and then the pronounced plunge into obscurity? If you read all his fiction (which I strongly advise not attempting), you find a steady if uninspired hand at the helm. Slowly, painstakingly, Tarkington had taught himself to write reliable prose and construct appealing fictions; he was unpretentious—always literate but never showy. You could count on him to catch your interest even if he failed to grip your imagination or your heart. And he was always a gentleman.

The article finds that Tarkington turned into a hack as he got older and concludes that "ultimately what stands between him and any large achievement is his deeply rooted, unappeasable need to look longingly backward, an impulse that goes beyond nostalgia."

Good find! As a kid I forced myself through some giant new volume of Penrod since the elementary school librarian said it was only for True Readers or something like that. The only thing I can remember about it was some gag about all the kids bumping into each other and saying "Pardon my bum."

Not to pick on Alfred but those NYRB J.F. Powers volumes have intros by the likes of Elizabeth Hardwick and Denis Donoghue.

David Ely
WIlliam Kotzwinkle
Richard Brautigan

Now wondering how the LoA edition of Tarkington fits in with my reissue rule, does it not really count because they kind of do it because of historical importance? Maybe my rule is BS? Don't really want to discourage people from submitting as many authors as possible that sort of fit, or disqualifying any author since somebody read them last week. Really thread should be interpreted as something like Out of Print or Out of Fashion.

Hmm. Kotzwinkle still going strong.

it's kind of true about brautigan, which is a fucking shame. he's one of my favorites and a big influence on my own writing style. he really got pigeonholed unfairly as a "hippie writer" i think.

do people still read william gaddis?

The bulk of the titles on those lists were the equivalents of like Arthur Hailey--popular but ignored or disliked by critics

As if we didn't need any more horror, I didn't know Winston Churchill wrote a novel.

It would be interesting to see how critical approval worked in that era. This was before the rise of literary academia. I imagine that what critical discourse took place took place mostly in newspapers and periodicals. But I suspect there wasn’t as strong a divide between highbrow and low brow in terms of marketing fiction as we have now.

Certainly if you look at the reviews in the Athenaeum and similar reviews, the critics were pretty snobby, and the writers they championed (Kipling, Hardy, James, Wharton, Stevenson) tend to be the ones we still remember. It didn't always work though--the NYT Book Review ran about 5 articles in 1905 about Algernon Swinburne's only novel, and that book has vanished from cultural memory almost completely.

The Winston Churchill on those lists is this guy I think:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill_(novelist)

Alfred, that's a different Winston Churchill!

xpost jinx

huh link didn't work:

Winston Churchill (November 10, 1871 – March 12, 1947) was an American best-selling novelist of the early 20th century.

He is nowadays overshadowed, even as a writer, by the more famous British statesman of the same name, to whom he was not related.

Wonders never cease.

It didn't always work though--the NYT Book Review ran about 5 articles in 1905 about Algernon Swinburne's only novel, and that book has vanished from cultural memory almost completely.

ha, I actually read it in the early '90s when discovering the delights of my college library. Lacquered sadomasochism from what I remember.

Thanks for the tip on the Athenaeum. Back issues are available online. Just dipping my toe into a list of books reviewed in the first half of 1892. Can’t say I see many familiar names, but maybe there’s a better way to find their top picks.

i tried to read that Swinburne book once but zzzzzz i didn't get far...really boring books about whipping people shouldn't be a thing.

i scored tons of new york times book reviews from the early 20th century once and they were more mostly filled with reviews of books that nobody remembers. it could be hard to find a book that i knew or had read.

it's funny to read book reviews, or look at even national book award winners from 10-15 years ago and go what??? who????

Hilarious I do know some of those titles/authors because my mom and I are obsessed with turn of the century women's and "adventure" fiction by a few specific authors; Kathleen Norris, Frances Hodgson Burnett (now mostly/only known for The Secret Garden), Gene Stratton-Porter, and James Oliver Curwood among them. (What was it with the triple barreled names??) All on this list!!! How delightful!

I have a HUGE soft spot for The Shuttle, on the list for 1908-09, and genuinely learned so much about that period of history from it.

Likewise, Stratton-Porter is now known mostly/only for Girl of the Limberlost which is a fucking JEWEL, but her others range from being treasures of place and ecology, rooted in Upper Midwest lumber history and naturalist study and the history of conservation...to outright disgusting anti-Asian racism, although I can't remember the title of that one and I'm sure it's kept out of print now.

That was so fun! Thanks for posting the link!

Genuinely, the main characters of The Shuttle and Girl of the Limberlost shaped a LOT of my thinking about the kind of person I wanted to grow up to be.

Writers sure took their three names seriously then.

Come to think of it I'll almost certainly inherit her whole library of those authors' works, collected over 40 years of visits to Michigan antique stores lol. If anything, it's shocking the physical books have held up as well as they have, considering they're about a hundred years old now. An equivalent book produced today could never.

Frances Hodgson Burnett (now mostly/only known for The Secret Garden)

The Little Princess too

I'm almost sure there's a copy of Diane of the Green Van in her collection too, which I don't remember anything about but this review is incredible.
https://redeemingqualities.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/diane-of-the-green-van/

She DEFINITELY has Oh, Money! Money! -- wow, these titles are really zinging the ol brainstem and dredging up memories. The inside of my head is a strange place, I genuinely don't know how to explain it a lot of the time. I haven't even mentioned all the Albert Payson Terhune and Grace Livingston-Hill.

xp Oh yes of course! I tried to re-read it recently. It was slow and uncomfortable going iirc, although my memories of young Sara Crewe's secret life in the attic are much sweeter.

"new review in the new yorker of this behemoth. has anyone read it? it looks like one of those things that seems really cool to me and if i bought it i would never read it. but maybe reading IN books like this are enough for me. like having a bible handy for a quick read of a page or two for fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_MacIntosh,_My_Darling";;;

Have seen plenty of screen shots of this one on twitter.

Its like a cross between modernism with something of the Beats about it (or my v limited understanding of what a beat novel is)...I want to try and get around it next yr.

― xyzzzz__, Friday, December 6, 2024

I posted about this on Oct. 27, incl. a repost from further upthread, also incl. caveat re another book of hers.

― dow, Saturday, December 7, 2024 9:07 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah thanks Dow, did read yr post. She looks -- from the excerpts -- def like a really challenging writer, but she could also be...not v good.

― xyzzzz__, Sunday, December 8, 2024

Reading the James Morrison recommended A Sultry Month and apparently in 1846 the London literary scene was abuzz with the novel Gräfin Faustine written by Ida, Countess von Hahn-Hahn ("cock cock! what a name!" exclaimed Mrs Carlyle), who then scandalizes high society by, on her visit, bringing along a life companion who is not her husband.

The saga:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22...And_Ladies_of_the_Club%22

― dow, Wednesday, 19 October 2022 02:41 (two years ago) link

I don't think I'll ever read this, but the story of its success is cool. All this from an overheard comment.

One local library patron, in returning the book, told the librarian that it was the greatest novel she had ever read. Another patron, Grace Sindell, overheard this and checked the book out herself. After reading it, she agreed with the assessment and called her son Gerald in Hollywood. He was at first reluctant to look at the book, believing that anything that was that good would already be taken. Unable to find a copy in California, he ordered one directly from the publisher and agreed that it had great potential. He convinced his Hollywood friend Stanley Corwin of the same and the two purchased movie, TV and republication rights. No film or television based upon the novel was ever produced. They sought literary representation from Owen Laster, literary head of the William Morris Agency, who read the book and also believed it was of considerable importance. Laster held an auction for the book, which was won by G. P. Putnam's Sons to republish the book. Before republication, the Book-of-the-Month club chose Ladies as their main selection. Suddenly, Santmyer and her novel were a media sensation, including front-page coverage in the New York Times.[1][3][4] The paperback edition, published by Berkley Books in 1985, sold more than 2 million copies between June and September, making it the best-selling paperback in history at the time.[5]

The only 1500 page novel that I've ever read in one sitting. I don't remember a thing about it.

There were ladies in it.

Oh, yeah. You're right.

Were they human?

They were dancer.