Novelists No One Reads Anymore

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?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n24/august-kleinzahler/no-light-on-in-the-house

do people still read william gaddis?

i plan on reading the recognitions this year

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n24/august-kleinzahler/no-light-on-in-the-house

― Ride On Proserpina (James Redd and the Blecchs)

"Often described a “pugnacious” and a “pugilist poet,” August Kleinzahler’s reputation rests on his jazzy, formally inventive and energetic poetry, though he has also garnered notice as something of a bad-boy literary outsider prone to picking fights with the establishment."

oh look a "fight me bro" poet decided to fight the corpse of richard brautigan

how _unexpected_

so many science fiction and fantasy writers who have fallen into obscurity. spider robinson. harry harrison. both pretty beloved writers when i was in my teens. does anybody remember either of them?

Yes, but mostly in the way that they are good candidates for this thread.

Spider Robinson really forgotten. Can’t remember much about him except that I once thought he had a cool name but then didn’t really like his writing, being especially disappointed by The Sliced Crosswise Timewise Cafe or whatever it was. Seem to later recall some entry about some book in the sf encyclopedia where John Clute said “avoid reading the unfortunate childish introduction by Spider Robinson” or words to that effect.

Harry Harrison remembered mostly as the author of the book the film Soylent Green was based on, Make Room, Make Room! although the book didn’t have the famous punchline. He also came up recently as begin married to one of the sf wives, who had also been married to… Damon Knight? Lester del Rey?

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon.

Evelyn Harrison became Lester del Rey’s third wife and died when they were in a car crash which he survived.

Harold Brodkey and John O’Hara both were more visible and important when alive than after. Not sure how much self-promotion, when alive, played a role in that.

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

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81APGPQjZmL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

i bought a two-volume copy about 10 years ago and haven't read more than 50 pages or so. It seemed worthwhile but exhausting, have been meaning to try it again, I met someone last year who was in an unusually intense book club that was planning on reading it once the new Dalkey Archive edition came out.

How many books that develop cult followings are super-long, immersive stories, in which you can choose to get lost as an alternate reality? Seems like a leading trait of these works. Tolkien comes easily to mind, but it grew so popular it can't be classified as a cult book anymore. Same for Frank Herbert and Dune Ad Infinitum.

Good to see the cycle of rediscovery continues, for instance w New Yorker's coverage and on here---as and where I mentioned a couple years ago:

Before I got off the Anne Tyler bus somewhere in The Accidental Tourist, gave her points for giving the Tourist an ideal longread travelling companion, which could even or especially be read satisfyingly at random: the massive novel Miss Mackintosh, My Darling, by Marguerite Young---wiki sez:

As she worked on The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler cured spells of writer's block by reading pages from Miss MacIntosh at random. "Whatever page I turned to, it seemed, a glorious wealth of words swooped out at me."[12] Tyler made Young's novel a traveling companion for her main character Macon Leary. A hardcover edition of the book was used as a prop in William Hurt's suitcase in the film adaptation.

Fave blurb:
In her zeal to demonstrate that nothing lives except in the imagination, Miss Young, with superb virtuosity, may have written a novel that in the profoundest sense does not exist.
— Melvin Maddocks, Christian Science Monitor, 9/16/1965

Behold:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_MacIntosh,_My_Darling
― dow, Friday, October 7, 2022 1:23 PM (two years ago)

However!
I started with her nonfiction novel concerning utopian pioneers, in Europe and then the American West: Harp Song For A Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, who she says was named for purple man-of-the-people novelist Eugene Sue, who I also posted about upthread, and for Victor Hugo. There's a little more about Debs in front, but then she goes back to a little bit about the Saint Simonists and Fourier and much more about Heinrich Heine and Marx (Sue fan) and Engels and mutual acquaintance Wilhelm Weitling---whom all three find squirrelly, but he has followers, investors, and he makes his way out West to check out new opps incl. among failed or declining utopias
---and that's as far as I've gotten, maybe 100 big, handsome, unnumbered pages in, but Young's self-satisfied literary silliness, her Big Sisterly affectionate tweaking of these beautiful losers/Davids vs. Moloch ov Kapital---also recurring "bird/word" and other play, and esp current extended spotlight on wet Weitling, is making me want to give up and check wiki etc for some of the unfamiliar stuff that she's mentioned.
But maybe I'll read some more of this as well, always wanting more Debs in my life.
But still curious about Miss Macintosh My Darling

I got the new edition, got maybe 100 pages in. Super wild prose, although a bit repetitive. That Anne Tyler move seems like it would totally work. Not the kind of book everyone could read straightforwardly. I dunno I really dug it but I don't know that I need 1000 pages of it in my life

Well, the Accidental Tourist finds it handy, because it's not something he has to plow through; he can just open it at random, I think, or anyway just on airplanes and in airports and hotel rooms and anywhere else he's bored shitless.
(The premise is that he's a fussy homebody who has to go somewhere, and comes back and writes a Letter To The Editor complaining about all those furriners over there---and the Editor thinks it's funny, and hires him to go places and complain, the opposite of the travel writing so common in Sunday Supplements etc. back then, in pre-Web times, when readers and moviegoers were like, "Hey, is that a real book? It is?" and some people I knew went looking for it, found it, liked it, though I dunno if any of 'em ever finished it; they may still be reading it, like the Accidental Tourist, which is fine.)
(Like I said upthread, I'd enjoyed Tyler's Searching For A Caleb and A Slipping-Down Life, but TAT started seeming too cuet, and I stopped reading, which might be wrong.)

this, spoilers, was on university challenge this evening as an early sensation novel along with a bunch of things i was familiar with (Wilkie Collins)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Lynne

on the front of the middle school in my town...

https://scontent-bos5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.18169-9/10525958_10153468466547137_3065521905104794440_n.jpg?_nc_cat=108&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=f798df&_nc_ohc=qf9Ve3XhnA8Q7kNvgETHHEV&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-bos5-1.xx&oh=00_AYA3PVUPRZIrHv-XoeYdX0eK1Ftx_1-ravvgqWztk5gOUw&oe=67598C15

The Bancroft would be this Bancroft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Howe_Bancroft

Okay, I know for a fact that nobody reads the colonialist fiction of P.C. Wren anymore.

https://i.imgur.com/KDEdSDk.png

xpost
For a moment I was getting Wren confused with A.E.W. Mason, who wrote the similarly colonial The Four Feathers (but also some detective fiction that may possibly still be read by someone, somewhere).

A friend was getting rid of some books the other day, including two 'Kai Lung' novels in Penguin by an author I'd never heard of before, Ernest Bramah:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Bramah

great work tracer

I've seen "Shakspere" as an early spelling but not "Shakespere". it is mentioned here though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_Shakespeare%27s_name

Shaq's Peer ftw

SeQpIr