Novelists No One Reads Anymore

Yeah there is about 2/3 I can think of that are missing.

Agreed re: the inconsistency of bibliographic info on the interweb.

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database has a broad remit and can sometimes be good for genre-adjacent writers - certainly puts literary fiction equivs to shame. Thomas Hinde has an entry:

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1615330

There's a critical anthology called The Salon.com reader's guide to contemporary authors, published in 2000. "Contemporary" in this case means "first published after WWII", although they specifically omitted the Beat writers on the basis that "they've been over-discussed" and everyone had their fill of them now.
Obviously the Beat writers stay in public memory as names and cultural figures, but what of their writing? Was this dismissal common in literary circles at the turn of the millennium? Has attention swung back towards these writers in the years since, or are they locked in the past? My guess is that Burroughs is probably more read than anything except maybe "Howl" these days.

I think Kerouac still gets checked out by readers as a "big name" and captures a smallish but continuing readership in that way. I think the Beat poets have had a bit better luck at finding readers than the novelists who aren't Kerouac. But this is a novelists-no-one-reads thread so poets are just tag-alongs here.

There were two Kerouac movies about 10 years ago. He's probably still being read, but since we're not in high school it's hard to know.

I'm surprised to see that Kerouac has four Library of America volumes.

Re: the Beats, Kerouac and Burroughs are still widely read among the novelists.

I wrote a big term paper about Wild Boys back in 2009. That’s his best afaic, and the most pornographic.

He was very interested in young men ejaculating while being hanged. Not judging.

He was! Also the power of gay sex to overthrow the state.

Which, frankly, I am totally here for.

xxxp i agree abt wild boys. it’s a great summation of the cut up trilogy + naked lunch, while shifting from the early single focus on hard boiled fiction to the “now we’re pirates / now we’re cowboys / now it’s sword and sandal” thing of the cities of the red night trilogy

idk how to describe the arc i see , except maybe trying on a succession of “mens adventure” styles as a formal device, whereas the early stuff is tied to hardboiled crime conventions and the middle is based in cut ups. wild boys is the one stop shop, the one single book of his that never gets stale or overdoes it in any part

i also think cities of the red night trilogy is really great, i recently got the boy scout manual he wrote but sadly haven’t even opened it. he has a million minor works to track down

i guess i think of wild boys as the spot where he jettisons the formal bs and the confessional junky stuff and really gets down to it, and then the cities of the red night is an expansion on that (pirates, cowboys and indians, sword and sandal being popular topics for early 20c runaway wild boy imaginations)

yeah, i would agree. of course the themes remain, but Wild Boys feels more apace with a fantasy novel about a war of feral twinks against polite society than the sad junky elicit desire exoticism of the early works.

he was, of course, an execrable person, but Wild Boys really is a treasure.

yeah for me i sort of got into the beats via burroughs. like i wanted to hang out with this weird poltergeist ii looking dude from ministry's "just one fix" and learn his weird negative philosophies. it wasn't like "now i want to read the one who hooked kerouac up with pills like a creepy older cousin with a fake ID, and survived hard drugs by turning into a scarecrow"

actually that makes it sound a lot cooler than it is, esp when you get into actual biography. i also appreciate that he moves away from the misogyny during that period, although i guess if you look at papers, interviews, etc he never quite hangs up it up entirely, even the worst stuff

yeah i found out enough to know i was fine with liking one of his books a lot, nothing more.

I think the Beat poets have had a bit better luck at finding readers than the novelists who aren't Kerouac.

Those are the only Beat-associated novelists beyond the Big Two that I can even think of (although later, when I read Tropic of Cancer, I thought the Beats might be influenced by Miller, who hasn't been mentioned yet on this thread, has he?)

i remember a burroughs interview where he specifically denies any miller influence, on him anyway.

ferlinghetti wrote at least one novel which i don't think i ever finished. lew welch wrote an unfinished novel which i liked. haven't read any of these peeps since my teens.

will always have a soft spot for miller for pointing me in the direction of so many other better writers.

Miller isn’t read much by young people because shocking sexism and graphic sex scenes aren’t too welcome.

Ginsberg’s aura has gone down a lot since his death and people became aware of two things: firstly, he was a NAMBLA supporter (yuk), and secondly, other than about ten poems, most of his work is abysmal

I picked up a copy of *The Colossus of Maroussi* recently. I think I'll leave Miller to memory but if I was to re-read him, this is where I'd go.

i don't find Miller especially graphic but his misogyny is very hard to get past. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare was the last book of his i still felt affection for but that's probably 20+ years ago

i've read a couple of Clellon Holmes's books, Nelson Algren feels like a proto-Beat in that mould, i think these are not "nobody reads" authors but v limited interest nowadays?

I went through a Miller phase in my early 20s, largely because Hunter Thompson, whose writing I still idolize, said he was, and I think this quote is right, "a fucking brilliant writer." Yes, he could write great sentences, that much is true. But everything said upthread is otm. Also, I read a biography of him once, and came away with the impression that he spent most of his life asking other people for money.

He did point me in the direction of Lawrence Durrell, who is mentioned upthread and who, while is not much read any more, probably should be.

asking other people for money is the mark of an artist tbf

Yeah, but he seemed to spend most of his waking hours doing that rather than writing. And he was obnoxious enough about it that most of his friends recalled that first and foremost.

I did very much enjoy his turn in Reds.

i was semi-joking, the "artist as bum" trope is its own kind of mythology. for another thread i guess - earning a living but staying free enough to do your thing without compromise, and whether that's possible or desirable

there are a few glorious beautiful passages in tropic of cancer but yeah ick

Was Steve Katz ever read in the first place?

i’ve had these thoughts too but i think if anything maybe it’s maybe just being part this line of mean mister self destructs that maybe also includes celine and baudelaire etc

“how i fought the law and found redemption transcended morality by hurting the people around me” pfffffft not so fast buddy

I did very much enjoy his turn in Reds.

"there was just as much fucking going on back then as there is now"

That was what young I got from Tropic! Wasn't surprised by the sexism, broads there for the taking etc.---don't remember racism, but wouldn't have been surprised by some of that, given the generation (also just as much that going on then as now). But without remembering specifics, overall, and warts and all, I thought it was---impressively well-constructed and articulate and robust, for something made out of scroungey old man--but also I read that it took him ten years to put it together, and given his limitations even so, one book was enough for me (though I'll check out xpostColossus if come across it).
That happens sometimes anyway, like somehow The Moviegoer. though great, is enough Percy for me, though I know I'm missing out.

After The Moviegoer you only really need The Last Gentleman and maybe some of the essays in Signposts in a Strange Land and The Message in the Bottle

Feel like YMP and I weighed in on this pretty recently, maybe upthread.

Yeah probably upthread, but maybe not so recently; we've been doing this a while.

Less familiarly, perhaps:

Speaking of The Moviegoer and Percy though, I sometimes wonder about novelists who were Beat without being part of that movement or whatever you call it: A certain vein of early-to-mid-century American, maybe especially Catholic artistry, looking out at the world, passing through it, committed to some things but always speculative, mystical in personal ways: Percy (no Graham Greene, but also suited to being) the convert, Kerouac born into it, at least in working class work-drink-think cycles, ---and James Agee, who seems like he may have influenced Kerouac, or at least preceded him via his own such (middle class) cycles, def incl. expeditionary flights as novelist, and machine-gun typewritin' moviegoer, for that matter, seemingly brushed by his Southern (Gothic?) "Anglo-Catholic" high church Episcopal upbringing, and then deepened by the (actually Catholic?) college mentor and lifelong correspondent---
Also, not Catholic, but---in Growing Up Absurd, Paul Goodman says, "Even Faulkner is Beat, in a complicated way," and thinking of that, I always think first of thee purple prolix barnstorming ov Pylon---Gough Man Gough!
(WF reportedly wrote it to "let off steam" from a bigger project: quite the work-drink holiday, I say.)

^nice post!

Thanks---one other thing, re the artist as mooch: for all his faults, Ginsberg, judging by what I've read and been told over many years, was quietly generous, right up to the end.

Ginsberg came into some money by selling his papers to Stanford University. He did a reading on campus and played the harmonium and chanted a bit in the mid-90s.

I guess Patreon and crowdfunding have enabled some artists to keep going economically.

This piece on Lisa Carver is illuminating on the material aspects of being a writer on the edges of economic viability from the ‘90s to the present:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-43/reviews/live-free-or-die/

I've told this story in another thread, but I worked at a record store in Boulder, Colorado in the 80s. Boulder was also home to the Naropa Institute, at which Ginsberg was a regular visitor. He would come into the store from time to time and ask whether we had the album First Blues (he never identified it as his, but of course we all knew who he was). I told him we did. What I didn't tell him was that it was the same copy we'd always had.

Omnivore has brought out a greatly expanded and often great The Last Word on First Blues, The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience and one I haven't heard, At Reed College: The First Recorded Reading Of Howl & Other Poems The olde Holy Soul Jelly Roll box is awes, ditto his Hal Willner-produced The Lion For Real. Like Burroughs and Kerouac, he was often at his best as performer, with his singing, speaking and harmonium guiding Don Cherry Elvin Jones,Arthur Russell, Dylan, Ribot, Frisell, The Clash etc. etct

(Novel-wise,Valmouth is so far pretty stupid, trying to decide whether to jump to ilx-favored The Flower Beneath The Foot or send these Five Novels back to library loan.)

I learned from John Szwed's Harry Smith bio that Allen Ginsberg gave him tons of $ & support (& Ginsberg wasn't rich) & Smith's later work wouldn't have been possible without Ginsberg. Also this Ginsberg LP recorded by Smith at the Chelsea Hotel is good! https://t.co/FHavRN0Pzg

— Marc Masters 🌵 (@Marcissist) July 30, 2023

I know it’s the wrong thread, but anyone who gets really enthusiastic about Ginsberg is either in high school or knows little about poetry-/ the poems, nor his performance of them, are very good.

xp love a lot of First Blues, esp the version of New York Blues on there

On the shelf in the public area of my daughter’s dorm there seems to be a copy of a Sidney Sheldon novel.

the other side of midnight!

Seems to be a brand new copy. By “the master of the unexpected.”

Another thread asserts that the film version wrecked Marie-France Pisier’s career.

Just returned to the spot. See a ton of Robert B. Parker on there.