Novelists No One Reads Anymore

Was waiting for Jonathan Livingston Seagull to show up! Couldn’t quite remember the author’s name anymore. In fact have been considering this thread as somehow related to In every 70s US home ever

Auel another good one. Seems to show up crosswords occasionally although I haven’t been paying attention recently.

Thought Santayana was more of a philosopher, didn’t know about novels.

michael arlen
w somerset maugham
e phillips oppenheim
mark rutherford

wsm prob the only one of these with even general name recognition nowadays?

xps to Dan S
got 3 len deighton titles on the 'classics table' in our shop right now 'ipcress file' 'ssgb' and 'berlin game'. sold okay in the wake of TV production of 'ipcress file'

also clive cussler still sells well

Auel literally has whole shelves to herself in every bookshop ime, fair to say people read her books still

i've been a third of the way thru gissing's new grub street for several years, not sure if this counters the thread project or affirms it

it's fine, what it isn't is grabby

James Hanley? I read one of his 70s books a few years back.

I think 'Boy' by Hanley still has some currency as a 'banned' etc book.

Angus Wilson
Nevil Shute
Harold Robbins
Desmond Bagley
Tom Sharpe

I've read an Angus Wilson or two, no idea what his current standing is but definitely doesn't deserve to be forgotten.

He is now more known as the father of scholar, and Homer translator, Emily.

Also had a lunch or two with the Queen, which he recounted, and came up during her becoming.

anybody still reading Wilbur Smith?

"There was a good New Yorker article a couple of years ago about Tarkington's changing reputation. Here's how it begins"

I remember how Tarkington came up as a contrast to William Gaddis in a (poor) review in the LRB of the reissues of his novels.

Wonder if a good way to come up with lists of writers no one reads would be to dig up old sales figures from past decades (something that's equivalent to the pop charts).

Not to pick on Alfred but those NYRB J.F. Powers volumes have intros by the likes of Elizabeth Hardwick and Denis Donoghue.

― Ride On Proserpina (James Redd and the Blecchs),

I'm aware -- I own one of them, bought about 15 years ago -- but you're being unusually insistent considering the top of this thread has no rules.

Denton Welch enjoyed some popularity when Exact Change of Galaxie 500 fame published his books. I think he's a great writer, but I haven't reread his writings in a while.

Welch probably picks up readers from William S Burroughs being a big fan - but I wonder how widely READ (as opposed to name checked) Burroughs himself is these days.

I think there's another category of writers who are definitely not forgotten and certainly still read but are just way less important than they were 30 years ago. People like Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, even Salinger.

What about the novelist Winston Churchill?—who is not the same guy

i checked out denton welch when i read a john waters book where he cited him as a favourite a few years back...i imagine quite a few ppl have done the same

ok I guess, not sure what you're mad about

― Dan S, Monday, September 26, 2022 10:06 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Ha I wasn’t mad about anything. Just saying that would be a good place to look for thread candidates.

joking around with comrade alph on another thread it struck me -- by wayward train of thought -- that no one reads carlyle any more

isn't he an "essayist"? does he even count as a novelist? yes! sartor resartus is a novel -- a comic novel abt hegelianism! *ilxors hurry off to get a copy*

i have a weird tattered ancient large-size versions somewhere, like an 1890s A3 graphic novel lol, i'm not even sure where from (i mean my family but i don't know which side of which side). i've never got beyond the first page, its humour really REALLY doesn't carry

Re: Alexander Baron, I think he's highly rated in the admitidely niche world of East London literature geeks.

When I did those books by year polls there were a lot of names that kept popping up again and again that I don't think have much exposure nowadays. Georgette Heyer I remember standing out.

Wonder if a good way to come up with lists of writers no one reads would be to dig up old sales figures from past decades (something that's equivalent to the pop charts).

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, September 27, 2022 5:08 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Bestselling fiction titles (Publisher’s Weekly)

1895
Ian MacLaren- Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush

1896
F. Hopkinson Smith- Tom Grogan

1897
Henryk Sienkiewicz- Quo Vadis

1898
F. Hopkinson Smith- Caleb West

1899
Edward Noyes Westcott- David Harum

Hammond Innes

now and then some of the more literary-minded american periodicals take it on themselves to get one of their um wittier stylists to do a kind of singles column of the best-selling books of 50 years gone, many of which are entirely forgotten

(the new yorker had anthony lane do one in the 90s and james wolcott did one did one for someone, maybe vanity fair, more recently)

anyway even if there's no chance of me soon deciding which of lane or wolcott is the worse writer and the crappier critical mind this concept is good!

ages ago i started trying to read CP Snow but didn't get into it, dunno how much he's read anymore

A shelf at my uni library groans with the weight of 50-year-old CP Snow paperbacks.

anybody borrowing them?

i have a handful also, nice late 50s penguins which i'm guessing my dad (a very arty scientist) dutifully read. i think i did try one as a teen and thought it was awful lol (not exactly a good judge then but happy to carry on believing i was correct)

in the same orange-backed reach of my bookshelves: some angus wilson and some anthony powell, v alluring cover illustrations, i believe i also attempted "the old men of the zoo" and metaphorically threw it against the wall

I think there is a distinction between truly obscure names, where no-one could readily eg: name a single book by the author or say who they were; and names that are well-known, where you could probably reel off titles and mention that author's place in history, but you haven't really read them.

For me, Wilfrid Sheed and Peter de Polnay are in the former category, and Bennett or Gissing are in the latter.

It seems to me that this thread started off mainly aiming to enumerate true obscurities, and quickly started including well-known names.

I agree that these names are now much less read than they were, but they're still quite famous.

I suspect that Maugham, Angus Wilson, Brautigan, not to mention Walter Scott and especially Mervyn Peake, are still read - especially given how many readers there are in the world, plugging away.

anybody still reading Wilbur Smith?

― Mizue loves company (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, September 27, 2022 10:03 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

had to direct a customer to his shelf just yesterday

This is the kind of reportage I like. Agree with pinefox's point tho

A Far Side cartoon of Wilbur Smith's Shelf, hewn from jungle vines with a machete, with animal skulls used as bookends.

I feel like the kind of people who read Wilbur Smith still insist on calling Zimbabwe "Rhodesia"

Yes, the pinefox otm. Thread would have been pretty short if we had only stuck to Type I Obscurity though, so mentally opened the gates to those other barbarians pretty quickly.

eBooks of works in the public domain are probably having an impact. I was pleased to discover that the Project Gutenberg website maintains lists of most frequently viewed/downloaded works (https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top) and books sorted by popularity (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?sort_order=downloads).

Starting to come around on J. F. Powers after seeing this:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-saint-with-a-bad-temper-j-f-powers-company/

Born in 1917, James Farl Powers in mid-life won the 1963 National Book Award for his first novel, Morte d’Urban, which Gore Vidal and his fellow judges found worthier than either of that year’s other leading contenders, Pale Fire or Ship of Fools. Nabokov’s masterpiece was “over-elaborate academic funning” compared to Lolita, as Vidal saw it, while Katherine Anne Porter’s best-seller had already been quite grandly, if not excessively, celebrated. Even Porter agreed with the verdict

We should start a thread on great short story writers whose novels suck, for Ship of Fools would land in the top five.

Go ahead!

That bbc article CaAL linked to is quite good and contains this interesting pull quote:

Unlike musicians or filmmakers, authors can vanish completely – Christopher Fowler

people keep recommending that i read mervyn peake. as well as peter curren brown, whose sole novel "smallcreep's day" was the inspiration for mike rutherford's solo concept album...

I own Smallcreep's Day but never finished it, it's pretty heavy-handed allegory imo

At some point I am actually going to back and talk about Wilfrid Sheed if I can manage

wilbur smith sold his name to his publisher around 10 years ago so I expect he was still selling well then.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/vdnwzb/wilbur-smith-gavin-haynes-sleepless-nights

legit "wow"

I read a lot of Jack Higgins, Alastair McLean, Frederick Forsyth etc as a kid and even then I thought Wilbur Smith was terrible

Wonder if a good way to come up with lists of writers no one reads would be to dig up old sales figures from past decades (something that's equivalent to the pop charts).