Novelists No One Reads Anymore

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?

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

do people still read william gaddis?

i want to see how many on the much longer list no one reads anymore

Ulysses references Corelli a few times i think, which may have extended her longevity and would imply that at least in Dublin in 1904 people were ignoring the New York Times Book Review

In 2007, the British film Angel, based on a book by Elizabeth Taylor, was released as a thinly-veiled biography of Corelli. The film starred Romola Garai in the Corelli role and also starred Sam Neill and Charlotte Rampling. It was directed by François Ozon, who stated, "The character of Angel was inspired by Marie Corelli, a contemporary of Oscar Wilde and Queen Victoria's favourite writer. Corelli was one of the first writers to become a star, writing bestsellers for an adoring public. Today she has been largely forgotten, even in England."

Horror critic R. S. Hadji placed The Sorrows of Satan at number one in his list of the worst horror novels ever written.[2]

Brian Stableford, discussing Corelli's "narcissistic" novels, described The Sorrows of Satan thus: "as delusions of grandeur and expressions of devout wish-fulfilment go, the fascination of the Devil was an unsurpassable masterstroke"

On Wormwood:

The Times described it as "a succession of tedious and exaggerated soliloquies, relieved by tolerably dramatic, but repulsive incidents", and criticized Corelli's writing as having a "feminine redundancy of adjectives".[2] The Standard described the book as "repulsive".

"Corelli’s heaving blend of overheated romance, vitalist metaphysics, and occultism, with plentiful hints of clairvoyance, reincarnation, mesmerism, Egyptian mysticism, and mysterious psychic powers and traditions, had secured her position as one of the most popular and successful authors of the Edwardian period, outselling writers like H. G. Wells, J. M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rudyard Kipling."

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/radioactive-fictions/

sounds rad tbh

Margaret Mackie Morrison "achieved international acclaim in 1932 with the publication, under her pen name March Cost, of her first novel A Man Named Luke," says Wikipedia. Someone must have read her stuff.

Ulysses references Corelli a few times i think,

The Guardian Angel by Paul de Kock

Introduction

Those who have heard of Paul de Kock at all will have probably have come across the name in Ulysses; Molly Bloom asks her husband Leopold to get her one of his books, and there are several other references to him in various places in the novel. (Though Sweets of Sin, the book Bloom bought, is apparently not by him.) Even to Joyceans it may come as a surprise to realise that Paul de Kock really existed; at least one (amateur) Joyce fan assured me that he didn't. But he did; he was a well-known and popular French author of the first half of the nineteenth centry. His books were translated into several languages, and popular in Britain for many years. Collected editions in English translation were published in both England and the USA in 1902-1904.

Paul de Kock - a Brief Biography

(From the 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica [1911])
KOCK, CHARLES PAUL DE (1793-1871), French novelist, was born at Passy on the 21st of May 1793. He was a posthumous child, his father, a banker of Dutch extraction, having been a victim of the Terror. Paul de Kock began life as a banker's clerk. For the most part he resided on the Boulevard St Martin, and was one of the most inveterate of Parisians.

Gonna try a drib of Drabble tonight

lol what does this mean: "was one of the most inveterate of Parisians"

i mean i realise it's just an arch joke really but what exactly are we meant to conclude abt m.de kock from it?

Maybe it refers to people who are about Paris the way some New Yorkers are about New York - it's the center of the universe and why would anyone ever leave for any reason?

this popped up in an episode of Dixon of Dock Green

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/984016.Ice_Bomb_Zero

17,000,000 Nick Carter books in print. number 63 in the Killmaster series.

more here
https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Nick-Carter/author/B001HP8G0I?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

turns out Nick Carter is the character name and was in more there 260 books

i have heard of none of them

lol a friend of mine has read some of these but he's fascinated by pulps and men's magazine stories in general

The definitive description of Nicholas J. Huntington Carter is given in the first novel in the series, Run, Spy, Run. Carter is tall (over 6 feet (1.8 m)), lean and handsome with a classic profile and magnificently muscled body. He has wide-set steel gray eyes that are icy, cruel and dangerous. He is hard-faced, with a firm straight mouth, laugh-lines around the eyes, and a firm cleft chin. His hair is thick and dark. He has a small tattoo of a blue axe on the inside right lower arm near the elbow—the ultimate ID for an AXE agent. At least one novel states that the tattoo glows in the dark. Carter also has a knife scar on the shoulder, a shrapnel scar on the right thigh. He has a sixth sense for danger.

Carter served as a soldier in World War II, then with the OSS, before he joined his current employer AXE.[2]

Carter practices yoga for at least 15 minutes a day. Carter has a prodigious ability for learning foreign languages. He is fluent in English (his native tongue), Cantonese,[3] French,[4] German,[4][5] Greek,[6] Hungarian,[7] Italian,[4] Portuguese,[8] Putonghua (Mandarin),[9] Russian,[9][10] Sanskrit,[11] Spanish[12] and Vietnamese.[13][14] He has basic skills in Arabic,[15] Hindi,[16] Japanese, Korean,[11] Romansch,[4] Swahili,[15] and Turkish.[17] In the early novels, Carter often assumes a number of elaborate disguises in order to execute his missions.

I'd probably read one of these if I found it at a charity shop.

The Nick Carter character was around in different forms long before the Killmaster series:

Nick Carter first appeared in the story paper New York Weekly (Vol. 41 No. 46, September 18, 1886) in a 13-week serial, "The Old Detective's Pupil; or, The Mysterious Crime of Madison Square" ...

I don't think anyone reads the dime novel or pulp magazine Nick Carter stories anymore either.

I used to see these books a lot at the Swap meet book trailers

the pulp versions are all public domain now so are available in the normal places. the killmaster stuff seems to go for over $20 a pop on Amazon, often much more (based on a random sample of half a dozen)

oddly Corelli got a passing mention on bbc4 last night, a repeat of the Victorian Sensations thing, Philippa Perry talking about seances etc

Does anyone read Edward Upward anymore?

I'm not sure anyone ever really read Upward apart from The Railway Accident for the Isherwood connection

Just looked at his Wiki page - he was older than Evelyn Waugh, yet only died in 2009!!

Fair point.
That's the only one I've read, and that's why I read it... Such a strange book....
2009?! did not know that...

I read The Railway Accident a long time ago, but remember being quite fascinated by it. There's a lot about the Mortmere stories in Isherwood's autobiography, the name of which escapes me...

Wiki says Upward wrote his final short story shortly before his 100th birthday... there's hope for us all!

I love Edward Upward, particularly the Spiral Ascent trilogy which is like a mini Dance to the Music of Time but with fretful middle class communists instead of the poshos. (Love ADttMoT also, fwiw).

The most recent of his books I read was The Scenic Railway from the late 90s(?)- I enjoyed that too, though I recall noticing the emergence of gerontophilia as something covered in his later stories!