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.
So you're saying there will always be an interplay of past and present literature so that the past feels equally as present as current day? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding.
Well, first, may I say how cool your tattoo of Milton's Paradise Lost is?
And I agree that today's writers are not going to have the legacy of yesterday's, partly, as you say, because so many books are published. I think there might be some more reasons though. My first novel was published in 1996 and my last story was November 2025 so I've seen a lot of changes.
Like you said, students are not reading as much or as deeply, but this is wider than that - a survey in the UK has shown that children reading solely for pleasure has dropped with only 30% enjoying reading.
Diversity in fiction has dropped - it wasn't there much before, but a survey in the UK shows that it's dropped dramatically in 2024 with barely any representation in children's fiction, and diversity within publishing has also dropped to (outside of London) less than 10%.
The publishing industry has changed dramatically. When I started out, there were many publishing houses - now there are only the big 3. This means less choice and less risk.
Back then, in the early nineties, we were at the tail end of writers being nurtured. Think Philip Roth, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie. They were mostly men and mostly white and no matter whether a particular book did well or not, the publishing house had faith, expecting that as these writers matured they'd get better and better. Generally they had one editor for most of their career. Cut to 2019 - I've just come to the end of my last 4 book deal and had 5 editors. By the time book 4 came out, no one in the company remained that had been there when I signed my contract in 2016.
Publishers frequently push authors to write more commercial fiction because they hope it's going to sell. Anne Enright famously published 231 copies of The Gathering before she won the Booker. My editor (for books 7 and 8) told me if I was going to carry on writing more literary fiction I'd either have to win a major prize like the Booker or be dropped after book 8. When I switched publishing house and started writing thrillers, she told me that was 'a very smart move.'
I feel that all of this has helped people view books as disposable and wish to invest less time and effort in reading them. It costs less to buy a book than it does to go to the cinema and yet the author could have spent a decade writing that book (as I once did!). I don't feel very hopeful, Kern, that many of us will be leaving a legacy, although was what I'd hoped, when I vowed to be a writer, aged 5 years old.
This is so insightful, Sanjida. What stands out to me the most in your comment is your observation about writers being nurtured. I remember reading something in my research for this piece that said authors of the past had no expectation of having a platform or a following before they signed a book deal. Marketing and promotion were left up to the publishers and they (the publishers) knew that it would take time for an author to develop a platform. Now authors are expected to have some type of audience and they are certainly expected to actively participate in the marketing and promotion of their own work. Whether this is right or not is for another discussion, but it is the current reality. And if an author is coming into a deal with little or no platform, patience seems to be much thinner from publishers. And to your other point, this drives publishers to push authors to more commercial genres.
I think we have seen a glimpse of a modern day solution to your premise, well in Latin America at least and perhaps it is emergent and stirring the US.
Kern, lets borrow the ideas from art works and investments that have the attributes of scarcity, name remembrance, lack of accessibility, uniqueness and ownership. Those artwork or investment will never have a use by date; you will remember them for decades, centuries as a historical source of truth.
We may have been shown a way by Argentinian Writer: Cesar Airia (pron: Uh-era)
Cesar has written over 80 books, it could well be over 100, he does not recall how many; seems as if he does not care. It is the production act that seems to matter most. He writes about 4 books a year scattered over small Indie presses.
Some of his works are very difficult to acquire. Yet he has a readership that want to grab anything he writes but are frustrated that early works not readily available or accessible.
So how does Cesar write 4 books a year? He has devised a creative process called "fuga hacia adelante" (flight forward). The method involves to continue to write without revising or altering anything previously written.
Once Aira finishes the writing, he does not go back to make changes; resists plot or genre constraints. This allows Cesar writing to flow naturally and spontaneously, capturing the immediacy and freshness of his thoughts.
I first heard of Cesar at the Melbourne Writers festival in 2011. LOL I will not forget his name.
The visual art world was partly the inspiration for this piece. Art is similar to literature in this case and I would imagine they have the same issues of who will be remembered.
That process of Airia is frightening. I can't imagine not revising my work. I feel anxiety even thinking about it.
I think Airia writing is slow considered continuous writing, is onto something to develop an idea and turn it into text; short story; novella; novel; essay; screenplay etc.
New sentences are formed from ideas that percolate in your mind during the sentence you have just written. It seems natural with no inner critic in sight or sound.
Unpacking this further.
The initial idea formed suggests to you (your unique personality as a writer) another idea to form a new sentence -- ad infinitum. It is no different to a tree trunk that has growing branches and it turn has sub-branches and so on resulting in foliage. And you say what a wonderful maple tree it is and I do like the way it has turned out.
In craft people will say writing is different to editing.
Lets stop right here.
When you begin to write you unconsciously edit, otherwise you would write gibberish. And so to write like a drain pipe's outpouring and spend time doing several drafts later feels that it wasteful, time confusing and wrong. There must be a better way.
The text just written above, I used my Airia's deconstructed process. I did not go back to edit.
So I believe it works there is potential and worth trying and developing it.
All about freedom and to see where it takes you.
My next step is to write a short story or novella. Lets see how it turns out. LOL
Ahahahah gosh I'm going to prepare my list of arguments and prepare to be challenged 🤣
The funny thing is I even bought the whole saga at a thrift bookstore without even reading the first book. Fortunately my boyfriend enjoyed them and eventually I sold them 🙈
“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.”
SIGH a sentiment I echo often myself, nothing wrong with these folks but they shouldn’t be the dominate focus.
I hate to say it but, given that we're heading further and further into the pit of despair that is AI, and given that year by year fewer and fewer Americans (and people generally) read books, especially literature, and given the proliferation of both devices and ideology...I estimate that by, say, 2050, literature as we know it will in some real essence no longer exist. At least not traditionally. Hopefully Substack will help here. But will anything here actually be remembered, passed down from generation to generation? I doubt it.
I really hope you're wrong Michael LOL. I'm curious...do you think that we (we, meaning writers and readers) need to organize some kind of global campaign to reignite the importance of literature? Kind of like America did that "say no to drugs" campaign in the 80s, I wonder if we really need to take some accountability in getting the message out that his is urgent?
“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…” sadly, I have found this to be very true when I attended university as a mature student from 2017-2021. This was the case in creative writing and English literature. Worse in Italian studies. Few seemed willing to do the work (of reading, listening and thinking critically!) but expected their A+ for showing up (often late) and being on their phones. I’ve often had the feeling of walking on eggshells when I voiced an opinion that was “out of the box” (which was quite often, because I am a big fan of nuance and looking at things from different angles). University environment became much worse by 2021. But I hear it’s changing now. Hopefully. On a positive note, my fourteen year old picked up “my brilliant friend” (in French) reluctantly, and got so into the story that she asked me to but all of Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. I have them in Italian, but now also in French. And my fifteen year old is enjoying your book “And then there was us” :) So there is hope! But I wonder how much our lifestyle is playing into this? 400 years ago they had books, theatre and music. Not cell phones with attractive screens and mindless short videos, and all these “influencers”… don’t even get me started.
I'm so confused by the observations of your university experience. Literature is such a passion based subject. You'd think students would be super passionate about the readings and attending class, not doom scrolling during the lectures. I just finished My Brilliant Friend! And I gave it to my daughter and she just finished it, too hahaha wow so odd. Also, so glad your daughter is enjoying And Then There Was Us. Makes me smile :)
And yet, I met my best friend (aka soul brother) at university. One of the smartest, kindest and hardest working individual. So I have hope. I told my daughter I’m next in line reading your book :)
I’m reminded of the line by Lester Bangs when Elvis Presley died during the first flowering of punk: “We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.” (The same time, I’ll note, as the Kundera quote avove.) There are too many branching paths, there is no *shared* corpus to form a group opinion about. But we can each walk in our own Secret Valley of Beautiful Flowers. And in a hundred years there will be a thousand blogs named “My The Neglected Books Page Is More Obscure Than Yours.”
Hi Kern, I enjoyed your piece very much, having comp lit by way of a Great Books curriculum in the 80s in an Honors Program at Boston College. We read The Brothers Karamazov and some Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Illych). When I was trying to understand the connection you alluded to between Dostoyevsky and War & Peace, I did learn that Dostoyevsky read Tolstoy's work in a serialized version (much like Dickens was serialized). https://classical-russian-literature.blogspot.com/2021/02/dostoevsky-reads-war-and-peace.html.) It was interesting to see what he thought of Tolstoy's tome. Anyway - about your larger theme, I often am reminded of what the novelist/essayist Milan Kundera wrote, presciently, about the future holding "too many writers" - who seemed to all be talking but too few listening/reading... which Kundera depicted, almost prophetically. It's a passage in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, written in the late 70s. This novel was, of course, long before the internet, social media, and before the decline in literacy/reading - even among the "educated," etc. However, I feel television and film were already cutting into the art of reading and attention. The internet, the smartphone, and social media just metastasized the slow-growing cancer of functional illiteracy. As a former college English instructor, in recent years, I did become heavily discouraged at the demise of reading and writing. As a result, I left that career earlier than I might have. It just no longer was what I wanted to do, to teach critical reading, writing, and civil discourse when it seemed like so very few students had the most basic skills or the desire to engage in this enterprise.
Thanks for those links, Laura. I'll check them out. And it can feel so discouraging to hear stories like yours. I'm an optimist (I think) and I have to believe that things will swing back in the direction of reading books being a real thing (meaning an appreciated thing). And even typing that is weird because a lot of people do read books and I don't want to play that down. The very fact that I have fans speaks to the broadness and abundance of readers. But at the same time, we'd be fooling ourselves if we said authors are a big part of popular culture.
I always love your posts... you make me consider things I hadn't thought of before. I agree with much of what you said. Most people don't read or value reading for its own sake. If they do read, it's a badge of honor. I also wonder if there's also a bit of historical anachronism impacting your pessimism about today's authors. Or perhaps it's nostalgic thinking? I don't know. Maybe both or neither. I think it's too early to know. All I do know is that the "greats" from centuries prior lived in a world vastly different from the one in which we live today. Today's "greats" will likely be also living in a world vastly different from centuries down the road. Perhaps they'll be asking the same questions about the authors of today and their time.
Thanks Rafia. You actually mentioned something I didn't consider, which is that the world of tomorrow will be vastly different from today, which is to say who knows what and who will be considered great. Because so much writing and authors that we admire today were not appreciated at all in their own time.
Appreciate your thoughts. The distressing reality that students don't/can't read much and therefore many adults don't is the big problem. That authors' reputations may not endure is a lesser problem. Because so many books come out these days, if many good ones were actually read it would be an interesting problem instead. Different people would have favorite authors who might or might not be widely known but literature would still be thriving.
Funnily enough, I've just started reading Milton, and have completely fallen in love with 'Paradise Lost'.
I think many contemporary writers like 'pandering' to a hype, a TikTok fad, et cetera. Meanwhile, the greats: Milton, Keats (let's include poetry), Brontes, Austen, the likes- they wrote about the human predicament. Themes that we all resonate to, no matter our cultural/religious background, whoever we are. A strong doses of humanism, which enables them to live forever.
I agree so much with your comment, Maryse. I think writers today write for different reasons than writers of the past. I also think readers (or people who happen to read a book) also do so for different reasons. I guess time will tell.
I keep wondering if William Carlos Williams could be an example of this type of longevity forming and playing out in real time. I found myself asking: Have "This is Just to Say" and "The Red Wheelbarrow" reached a level of ubiquity (in anthologies, allusions, classrooms, etc.) that they will last (and make WCM's name last) because of their sheer saturation? 🤔 I think "Will today’s authors be remembered tomorrow?" is my new Roman Empire.
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.
Ahh crap. Good catch. I'll make the edit.
And yes, sometimes the legacy of your writing isn't public but in the private ways it has changed lives.
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.
So you're saying there will always be an interplay of past and present literature so that the past feels equally as present as current day? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding.
That will occur for some works more than others, as the reputations of their authors rises and falls over time.
Gotchu. Makes sense.
Well, first, may I say how cool your tattoo of Milton's Paradise Lost is?
And I agree that today's writers are not going to have the legacy of yesterday's, partly, as you say, because so many books are published. I think there might be some more reasons though. My first novel was published in 1996 and my last story was November 2025 so I've seen a lot of changes.
Like you said, students are not reading as much or as deeply, but this is wider than that - a survey in the UK has shown that children reading solely for pleasure has dropped with only 30% enjoying reading.
Diversity in fiction has dropped - it wasn't there much before, but a survey in the UK shows that it's dropped dramatically in 2024 with barely any representation in children's fiction, and diversity within publishing has also dropped to (outside of London) less than 10%.
The publishing industry has changed dramatically. When I started out, there were many publishing houses - now there are only the big 3. This means less choice and less risk.
Back then, in the early nineties, we were at the tail end of writers being nurtured. Think Philip Roth, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie. They were mostly men and mostly white and no matter whether a particular book did well or not, the publishing house had faith, expecting that as these writers matured they'd get better and better. Generally they had one editor for most of their career. Cut to 2019 - I've just come to the end of my last 4 book deal and had 5 editors. By the time book 4 came out, no one in the company remained that had been there when I signed my contract in 2016.
Publishers frequently push authors to write more commercial fiction because they hope it's going to sell. Anne Enright famously published 231 copies of The Gathering before she won the Booker. My editor (for books 7 and 8) told me if I was going to carry on writing more literary fiction I'd either have to win a major prize like the Booker or be dropped after book 8. When I switched publishing house and started writing thrillers, she told me that was 'a very smart move.'
I feel that all of this has helped people view books as disposable and wish to invest less time and effort in reading them. It costs less to buy a book than it does to go to the cinema and yet the author could have spent a decade writing that book (as I once did!). I don't feel very hopeful, Kern, that many of us will be leaving a legacy, although was what I'd hoped, when I vowed to be a writer, aged 5 years old.
This is so insightful, Sanjida. What stands out to me the most in your comment is your observation about writers being nurtured. I remember reading something in my research for this piece that said authors of the past had no expectation of having a platform or a following before they signed a book deal. Marketing and promotion were left up to the publishers and they (the publishers) knew that it would take time for an author to develop a platform. Now authors are expected to have some type of audience and they are certainly expected to actively participate in the marketing and promotion of their own work. Whether this is right or not is for another discussion, but it is the current reality. And if an author is coming into a deal with little or no platform, patience seems to be much thinner from publishers. And to your other point, this drives publishers to push authors to more commercial genres.
Intriguing Post Kern.
I think we have seen a glimpse of a modern day solution to your premise, well in Latin America at least and perhaps it is emergent and stirring the US.
Kern, lets borrow the ideas from art works and investments that have the attributes of scarcity, name remembrance, lack of accessibility, uniqueness and ownership. Those artwork or investment will never have a use by date; you will remember them for decades, centuries as a historical source of truth.
We may have been shown a way by Argentinian Writer: Cesar Airia (pron: Uh-era)
Cesar has written over 80 books, it could well be over 100, he does not recall how many; seems as if he does not care. It is the production act that seems to matter most. He writes about 4 books a year scattered over small Indie presses.
Some of his works are very difficult to acquire. Yet he has a readership that want to grab anything he writes but are frustrated that early works not readily available or accessible.
So how does Cesar write 4 books a year? He has devised a creative process called "fuga hacia adelante" (flight forward). The method involves to continue to write without revising or altering anything previously written.
Once Aira finishes the writing, he does not go back to make changes; resists plot or genre constraints. This allows Cesar writing to flow naturally and spontaneously, capturing the immediacy and freshness of his thoughts.
I first heard of Cesar at the Melbourne Writers festival in 2011. LOL I will not forget his name.
Here is an absorbing interview:
https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/2011/08/cesar-aira-writing-is-my-freedom-where-i-receive-orders-from-no-one-not-even-from-myself/
So the point of all this ?
It is a strategy to be remembered like art works or prized investments.
Another Argentinian writer that fits mold is Borges and his unforgettable: Labyrinths.
The mental gymnastics is challenging but I have had enjoyable multiples reads over the years.
Again, I will forget the author or that work, he was prolific.
The visual art world was partly the inspiration for this piece. Art is similar to literature in this case and I would imagine they have the same issues of who will be remembered.
That process of Airia is frightening. I can't imagine not revising my work. I feel anxiety even thinking about it.
Kern lets try a little experiment.
I think Airia writing is slow considered continuous writing, is onto something to develop an idea and turn it into text; short story; novella; novel; essay; screenplay etc.
New sentences are formed from ideas that percolate in your mind during the sentence you have just written. It seems natural with no inner critic in sight or sound.
Unpacking this further.
The initial idea formed suggests to you (your unique personality as a writer) another idea to form a new sentence -- ad infinitum. It is no different to a tree trunk that has growing branches and it turn has sub-branches and so on resulting in foliage. And you say what a wonderful maple tree it is and I do like the way it has turned out.
In craft people will say writing is different to editing.
Lets stop right here.
When you begin to write you unconsciously edit, otherwise you would write gibberish. And so to write like a drain pipe's outpouring and spend time doing several drafts later feels that it wasteful, time confusing and wrong. There must be a better way.
The text just written above, I used my Airia's deconstructed process. I did not go back to edit.
So I believe it works there is potential and worth trying and developing it.
All about freedom and to see where it takes you.
My next step is to write a short story or novella. Lets see how it turns out. LOL
Nothing terrifying about that.
I did not like my brilliant friend at all 🙊 I didn't even finish it. We can talk about it next time 😉
😮😮 we need to schedule a talk sooner then because I can not wait to find out why you disliked that book.
Ahahahah gosh I'm going to prepare my list of arguments and prepare to be challenged 🤣
The funny thing is I even bought the whole saga at a thrift bookstore without even reading the first book. Fortunately my boyfriend enjoyed them and eventually I sold them 🙈
🤦🏾♂️ nous devons parler.
We listen and we don't judge 🤣
Food for thought - a very interesting read, thank you
“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.”
SIGH a sentiment I echo often myself, nothing wrong with these folks but they shouldn’t be the dominate focus.
Exactly. Nothing at all wrong witht them, but can we expand who we admire publicly...
I hate to say it but, given that we're heading further and further into the pit of despair that is AI, and given that year by year fewer and fewer Americans (and people generally) read books, especially literature, and given the proliferation of both devices and ideology...I estimate that by, say, 2050, literature as we know it will in some real essence no longer exist. At least not traditionally. Hopefully Substack will help here. But will anything here actually be remembered, passed down from generation to generation? I doubt it.
I really hope you're wrong Michael LOL. I'm curious...do you think that we (we, meaning writers and readers) need to organize some kind of global campaign to reignite the importance of literature? Kind of like America did that "say no to drugs" campaign in the 80s, I wonder if we really need to take some accountability in getting the message out that his is urgent?
“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…” sadly, I have found this to be very true when I attended university as a mature student from 2017-2021. This was the case in creative writing and English literature. Worse in Italian studies. Few seemed willing to do the work (of reading, listening and thinking critically!) but expected their A+ for showing up (often late) and being on their phones. I’ve often had the feeling of walking on eggshells when I voiced an opinion that was “out of the box” (which was quite often, because I am a big fan of nuance and looking at things from different angles). University environment became much worse by 2021. But I hear it’s changing now. Hopefully. On a positive note, my fourteen year old picked up “my brilliant friend” (in French) reluctantly, and got so into the story that she asked me to but all of Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. I have them in Italian, but now also in French. And my fifteen year old is enjoying your book “And then there was us” :) So there is hope! But I wonder how much our lifestyle is playing into this? 400 years ago they had books, theatre and music. Not cell phones with attractive screens and mindless short videos, and all these “influencers”… don’t even get me started.
I'm so confused by the observations of your university experience. Literature is such a passion based subject. You'd think students would be super passionate about the readings and attending class, not doom scrolling during the lectures. I just finished My Brilliant Friend! And I gave it to my daughter and she just finished it, too hahaha wow so odd. Also, so glad your daughter is enjoying And Then There Was Us. Makes me smile :)
And yet, I met my best friend (aka soul brother) at university. One of the smartest, kindest and hardest working individual. So I have hope. I told my daughter I’m next in line reading your book :)
I’m reminded of the line by Lester Bangs when Elvis Presley died during the first flowering of punk: “We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.” (The same time, I’ll note, as the Kundera quote avove.) There are too many branching paths, there is no *shared* corpus to form a group opinion about. But we can each walk in our own Secret Valley of Beautiful Flowers. And in a hundred years there will be a thousand blogs named “My The Neglected Books Page Is More Obscure Than Yours.”
Haha love this, Jim. So true. There will probably be 10,000 of those sooner than later.
Hi Kern, I enjoyed your piece very much, having comp lit by way of a Great Books curriculum in the 80s in an Honors Program at Boston College. We read The Brothers Karamazov and some Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Illych). When I was trying to understand the connection you alluded to between Dostoyevsky and War & Peace, I did learn that Dostoyevsky read Tolstoy's work in a serialized version (much like Dickens was serialized). https://classical-russian-literature.blogspot.com/2021/02/dostoevsky-reads-war-and-peace.html.) It was interesting to see what he thought of Tolstoy's tome. Anyway - about your larger theme, I often am reminded of what the novelist/essayist Milan Kundera wrote, presciently, about the future holding "too many writers" - who seemed to all be talking but too few listening/reading... which Kundera depicted, almost prophetically. It's a passage in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, written in the late 70s. This novel was, of course, long before the internet, social media, and before the decline in literacy/reading - even among the "educated," etc. However, I feel television and film were already cutting into the art of reading and attention. The internet, the smartphone, and social media just metastasized the slow-growing cancer of functional illiteracy. As a former college English instructor, in recent years, I did become heavily discouraged at the demise of reading and writing. As a result, I left that career earlier than I might have. It just no longer was what I wanted to do, to teach critical reading, writing, and civil discourse when it seemed like so very few students had the most basic skills or the desire to engage in this enterprise.
Thanks for those links, Laura. I'll check them out. And it can feel so discouraging to hear stories like yours. I'm an optimist (I think) and I have to believe that things will swing back in the direction of reading books being a real thing (meaning an appreciated thing). And even typing that is weird because a lot of people do read books and I don't want to play that down. The very fact that I have fans speaks to the broadness and abundance of readers. But at the same time, we'd be fooling ourselves if we said authors are a big part of popular culture.
I always love your posts... you make me consider things I hadn't thought of before. I agree with much of what you said. Most people don't read or value reading for its own sake. If they do read, it's a badge of honor. I also wonder if there's also a bit of historical anachronism impacting your pessimism about today's authors. Or perhaps it's nostalgic thinking? I don't know. Maybe both or neither. I think it's too early to know. All I do know is that the "greats" from centuries prior lived in a world vastly different from the one in which we live today. Today's "greats" will likely be also living in a world vastly different from centuries down the road. Perhaps they'll be asking the same questions about the authors of today and their time.
Thanks Rafia. You actually mentioned something I didn't consider, which is that the world of tomorrow will be vastly different from today, which is to say who knows what and who will be considered great. Because so much writing and authors that we admire today were not appreciated at all in their own time.
Appreciate your thoughts. The distressing reality that students don't/can't read much and therefore many adults don't is the big problem. That authors' reputations may not endure is a lesser problem. Because so many books come out these days, if many good ones were actually read it would be an interesting problem instead. Different people would have favorite authors who might or might not be widely known but literature would still be thriving.
Agreed that students not reading is the larger issue. Makes me anxious for our future in so many ways.
Funnily enough, I've just started reading Milton, and have completely fallen in love with 'Paradise Lost'.
I think many contemporary writers like 'pandering' to a hype, a TikTok fad, et cetera. Meanwhile, the greats: Milton, Keats (let's include poetry), Brontes, Austen, the likes- they wrote about the human predicament. Themes that we all resonate to, no matter our cultural/religious background, whoever we are. A strong doses of humanism, which enables them to live forever.
I agree so much with your comment, Maryse. I think writers today write for different reasons than writers of the past. I also think readers (or people who happen to read a book) also do so for different reasons. I guess time will tell.
I keep wondering if William Carlos Williams could be an example of this type of longevity forming and playing out in real time. I found myself asking: Have "This is Just to Say" and "The Red Wheelbarrow" reached a level of ubiquity (in anthologies, allusions, classrooms, etc.) that they will last (and make WCM's name last) because of their sheer saturation? 🤔 I think "Will today’s authors be remembered tomorrow?" is my new Roman Empire.