Will today's authors be remembered tomorrow?
WHO WILL BE THE LITERARY HEROES OF THE FUTURE?
Tattooed on the inside of my left forearm reads:
The mind is
its own place, and in itself
can make a Heav’n of Hell
a Hell
of Heav’n
I’m sure more than half of you know that this is a quote from John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost. Even if you’ve never read the book, those words are familiar.
Paradise Lost is one of my favourite pieces of literature. I took a full course on Milton while in university and studied not just Paradise Lost, but all of Milton’s writing. There was something I found so intriguing about the way he wrote, culminating in what today is his most significant literary achievement and one of the Western world’s most celebrated pieces of literature. Despite Paradise Lost being published in 1667, Milton is still studied in educational institutions around the world.
I want to pause here for a quick second.
Take a minute and reread that last sentence because I don’t think we understand how impossible that is. 1667 is nearly 400 years ago. No cars, no airplanes, no TVs, no internet; yet somehow this story managed to stimulate most of society’s imagination for four centuries, and Milton isn’t the only one.
So my question is this: If Milton and other historic writers are the central subject in university classrooms and society's imagination today, which pieces of literature and which authors of those literatures will be central tomorrow? And the tomorrow after that? And the one after that?
When first conceiving this piece, I was tempted to say that none of today’s authors will be remembered and revered in the same way. But that would be based on some kind of gut feeling that I had no way of quantifying. As I took a deeper dive into the research, I realized that there are other forces at play that contribute to whether or not an author will be remembered.
Quick: without googling, tell me the name of the author who wrote Unaccustomed Earth? Okay, maybe that was a hard one. What about Gilead? No? Okay, what about My Brilliant Friend? You must know who wrote that one, right? Well, all of these books were bestsellers and the last two were chosen from the NYT top 100 books of the 21st century (they were in the top 10 and My Brilliant Friend was number one).
What if we spin this around…if I asked you who wrote Romeo and Juliette, you’d think I was insulting you. Even if I asked who wrote Pride and Prejudice, you’d think I was trolling. Yet both Shakespeare and Jane Austen were writing hundreds of years ago and you were likely able to remember their name a lot more quickly than the first group I asked about.
There’s a reason for that. Actually, there are a few reasons. Let’s start with the most obvious so we can get that out of the way.
The first reason why I’m not sure today’s authors will be remembered is because there are too many of them. Recent statistics reveal that one to four million books are released every single year. That’s an astronomical number of authors releasing new titles. With a figure that high, it’s easy for even great books to get lost in the sea of saturation, especially since self-publishing became a thing.
While the sheer number of authors makes it difficult to stand out, that doesn’t quite clear our dilemma. In fact, it complicates it. Because if there are far more authors today than yesteryear, doesn’t that mean that far more authors should be remembered tomorrow?
I’m not sure I can answer that affirmatively.
That’s one reason, but another reason I question the potential longevity of today’s authors has to do with how authors are placed in relation to their work. Before the twentieth century, separating an author from their work was not at all how society functioned. The authors of the past, especially pre-capitalism (and even early capitalism), were writing more for prestige and legacy than they were for profit. I touched on this in my previous newsletter. These writers wrote to influence culture, to be discussed in cultural circles of the time and have an impact on how people viewed the world.
The general public back then would read a book because of its author. They would’ve picked up the Penny Dreadfuls because Dickens had a piece. They would’ve bought The New York Ledger because Fanny Fern just released a new story. There was no separating Don Juan from Lord Byron in the same way it was impossible to separate Crime and Punishment from Dostoevsky. Authors of the time knew that was the case. They knew their work was connected to who they were and how they would be perceived. In a way, they treated their writing more like carvings on stone than ink to paper.
Then Comparative Literature came along (Comp Lit for my uni peeps) and intellectuals and their students studied these authors and their work in a pronounced and intimate manner. Comparative literature was (and is) all about forming an understanding of multiple texts in their entirety by considering social, geographical, and historical influences to that text and comparing that literature through a stated lens. For instance, you can compare If And Egyptian Cannot Speak English with A Brief History Of Seven Killings under the structural lens of Formalism, which focuses on the structure, form, and content of the piece independent of the author’s intent or the reader’s interpretation.
Comp Lit formally took shape in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Scholars began studying texts across language and literary boundaries to ultimately explore and define any common themes. This type of deep dive into literature continued into the twentieth century when American scholars started evangelizing Comp Lit. Back then, this was just the way it was. It was how people approached and studied literature; with a keen eye and deep yearning for meaning.
This type of devotion to studying and understanding literature doesn’t exist in the same way as it did back then. Yes, comp lit is still a thing, but it has been diminished by a frightening decline in western literacy and a shift in the expectations of students
Several professors have made the observation that students today attend university not with an open mind to shape their critical thinking, and certainly not to be challenged in their viewpoints. There have been complaints by many professors that some students in literary studies refuse to read authors on the assigned list simply because those authors are male. When the professors challenge the students to investigate why they feel that way and be more open to perhaps altering or at least expanding their belief, students shut down and outright refuse.
That type of refusal is enough for them to earn “street cred” on internet platforms because they will post about their refusal to a cascade of likes and affirmative comments. What remains is a lack of insight into the human condition—justified or otherwise—that is central to the goal of great literature. Without that level of intimacy, how will readers ever expect to make a deep and lasting connection with authors?
I’ve mentioned briefly in another piece that high school students are being discouraged from reading entire books (I just had a full conversation with a high school teacher about this and it’s horrific and true) and university students are complaining that reading entire books is too much…reading. Yeah, I don’t get it either, but let’s get back to my point.
The most intellectual spaces I’ve noticed for diving into literature are YouTube and Substack. I’ve seen some video essays that were captivating and I’ve most certainly been part of thrilling literary convos on Substack. (I’ve started some of those convos right here on Writers Are Superstars.) But the usage of these platforms for literary exploration is fairly new. Substack is less than a decade old and BookTube’s influence, in my opinion, is only now getting started (meaning within the last couple of years). We won’t be able to judge their full influence for some years, especially with the ephemeral nature of a social media platform’s popularity.
If I’m being honest, I find it a bit sad that Marlon James will likely be forgotten by 2030. By then, another 20 million books would have been released. I find it equally disheartening that there are authors who have sold more physical books than Drake and Kendrick Lamar have sold albums and yet many of us don’t know their names, much less make these authors the central topic of discussion and celebration for years and years.
How many authors trend after their first week of sales? Or when they have a book launch? Yet their influence in today’s literary culture is massive.
Which brings me to my last point: Popular culture no longer includes literature. It takes a book getting turned into film for an author to get any public recognition outside of publishing circles, and that’s still not a guarantee or even something the author could reasonably expect.
Film, music, video games, and social media are now touted as the “cool” forms of consumption and actors, musicians, gamers and influencers are the new Dickens. These are who the public holds up as celebrities and the people to be celebrated. With very few exceptions, the majority of bestselling authors could walk down a crowded street with no one pulling out their phones to ask for a selfie.
If authors were getting shoe deals, promoting liquor brands, collaborating with fashion houses, maybe they would be viewed in the same way as the actors, musicians and influencers of the day. As it stands right now, while books still sell at a high rate, an author’s public value seems to be diminishing.
So where does that leave us? There are more books being released yearly than there are people in most cities and towns across the world. Couple that with authors not being placed in the same proximity to their work or being revered in the same way as centuries past (I’d say the early to mid-twentieth century were the last superstar authors, meaning they were popular outside of literary circles and actually penetrated popular culture.) Now add to the mix that literature is not studied with the same intensity, passion and attention to detail and you have some indication of why today’s authors may not be remembered past their lifetime.
But who knows, maybe I’m wrong. What do you think? Will today’s authors be remembered tomorrow?
Very interesting! Minor note...war and peace is Tolstoy. Dostoevsky is Brothers Karamazov. Both incredible writers!
I hope that even if the world doesn't remember my work, the people whose lives it helped in some way will remember.
This is more true of literary fiction than it is for, say, speculative fiction. There is an established tradition here of what Harold Bloom called "the anxiety of influence": the persistent influence of prior generations on present and possibly future ones. So we can't entirely understand current works in these fields without understanding how those who preceded us used the sorts of tropes and ideas we want to use. And that's why the heavy hitters of the past and the newer stars often occupy equal space in the book displays.