Novelists No One Reads Anymore

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 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?

aldington i kept bumping when i used to be in the english language modernists etc, think if anything id have him as a v minor poet, didn’t realise he’d written any novels or if i did know i’ve forgotten.

Edward Dahlberg

No one except skot that is

Burgess picks the whole of Williamson's Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight in his 99 novels selection, while admitting "In the later volumes a pro-Fascist tone prevails, highly disturbing, and an almost manic bitterness which is far from acceptable"!

his son played on some gong related projects iirc

xpost: liked the dahlberg collection i read a few years back!

& xposts: yeah aldington mostly known for his imagist association and biographies of the two lawrences. death of a hero is the only one of his novels that got/gets any attention as far as i know. was even published as a penguin which is why i'm surprised i've never spotted it.

also reading an article about goldring's lit mag turns out it was where a bunch of what would later become lewis's the wild body was first published speaking of fash

The only Williamson I’m curious to read is his unused film treatment for tarka that was 400,000 words long & basically encompassed that whole 15-novel cycle, going through centuries of history of the region before the otter even appears; weirdly the producers ended up going in a different direction. His descendants seem to work extremely hard at whitewashing his more unsavoury traits but even the official website basically intimates it was the scribblings of a demented crackpot

I myself have been meaning to read Dahlberg for a long while/pvmic

Mayne Reid, who wrote 75 adventure novels of the American West in the mid-1800s, which were quite popular, especially with young readers, and translated into many languages. He was cited as an early influence by some better-remembered writers, such as Nabokov, Chekhov, Milosz, Conan Doyle.

I just ran across this 1897 article from The Yellow Book called "A Forgotten Novelist" about an 18th century writer named Robert Bage

https://archive.org/details/yellowjan189712uoft/page/n318/mode/1up

i keep my dahlberg books handy for comfort reading. he always brings a smile to my face.

Just came across a cheap ebook of mentioned upthread and championed by Conrad Knickerbocker author Charles Wright’s novels that looks intriguing

Reminds me I have a Wright threefer somewhere: The Messenger, The Wig, and Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About, with intro by Ishmael Reed. Gotta dig that one up and get started!

Marie Corelli

The popularity of Marie Corelli has never been understood in this office, ‘“The Review of Books and Art” has done its full duty in pointing out the errors of Marie’s literary ways. Readers who still linger over her pages must do so at their own risk. The editor can no longer feel that he is in any way responsible for them. Mr. Alden’s letter from London, printed last week, probably explains the recruiting ground whence Marie’s readers are mainly drawn. He said she is read “by people who are ‘so fond of reading,’” and that, when a new book of hers comes out, the chambermaid is sure to read it. Here are the sources for a very large following, and Marie Corelli unquestionably has one. She was virtually started on her successful career by an august personage— who to have been told better—the Queen herself. Since the Queen was known to read her works, thousands of other persons, beginning with chambermaids and rising in the social scale far too high, have been drawn into the miscellaneous following.

But this is no reason why “Harry ©.” should read Marie Corelli. The Queen may do so, but he should not. It will be neither wise nor profitable for him to waste his holiday hours in that vain pursuit. The editor is glad to know that he finds “The Sorrows of Satan” “rather ridiculous,” and sees in that fact sound literary judgment. Publishers’ counters are loaded with better fictions than hers. Here below is a list (which the editor has chosen somewhat at random from the much longer list printed in “The Review” on Dec, 11) to which “Harry C.”, and all his reading friends are earnestly urged to give their days and nights, rather than to the books of Marie

--New York Times Book Review, Jan. 8, 1898

“The Review of Books and Art” has done its full duty in pointing out the errors of Marie’s literary ways.

Amazing line

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.