Novelists No One Reads Anymore

My favorite fact from Mervyn Peake's Wikipedia entry:

Peake designed the logo for Pan Books. The publishers offered him either a flat fee of £10 or a royalty of one farthing per book. On the advice of Graham Greene, who told him that paperback books were a passing fad that would not last, Peake opted for the £10.

Trying to calculate what his eventual income would have been had he chosen the farthing.

Thread delivers, thanks YMP!

Winston Churchill (not that one) definitely belongs in this thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill_(novelist)

Heh, just noticed that Wallace Stegner wrote a biography of Bernard DeVoto.

Any relation to Howard Devoto?

hi there

https://i.imgur.com/95GTVBZ.jpg

bernard is where howard d got the name from -- a book he read as a student i think

(his birth surname is trafford)

I can confidently report that Bernard DeVoto is NOT related to Howard DeVoto of the Buzzcocks (which is, alas, a pseudonym).

lol xp

Any relation to Howard Devoto?

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, September 27, 2022 1:01 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

"I definitely don't remember this happening."

I can't find an confimation of mark's explanation, much as I want to believe.

a or any

I wonder if Harry Styles has given Brautigan a slight bump in popularity.

Have read, and enjoyed, Snow's Strangers and Brothers series (under the influence of Burgess' 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939). Not great literature, but I intend to return and re-read a couple volumes at some point.

Ronald Firbank probably belongs here? (The Flower Beneath the Foot: Being a Record of the Early Life of St. Laura de Nazianzi was a good read for me last year)

Disappointed by the new thread title*

*Please don't change it.

Wrong thread!

https://wikimili.com/en/Buzzcocks#cite_note-14:
↑ Some sources claim that the surname came from a "bus driver in Cambridge" mentioned by a philosophy tutor at Bolton (e.g. Dave Wilson, 2004, Rock Formations: Categorical Answers to how Band Names Were Formed, San Jose:, Cidermill Books, pp. 38–9). Other accounts link it to US novelist Bernard DeVoto. (See, for example, Adrian Room, 2010, Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 13,000 Assumed Names and Their Origins, 5th ed., Jefferson, North Carolina/London, McFarland & Company, pp. 38, 144.

i mean it's possible it's the "bus driver in cambridge" mentioned by the "philosophy tutor at bolton" (maybe it was a trolley not a bus)

that's not where i read it btw (but my music books are all in boxes and anyway probably i remember it from being a clean teen slate reading the inkies in 1977)

i will tentatively add Jocelyn Brooke here, even though i bang on about him a lot, and he didn’t sell *that* much even when he was around. now in the Faber Finds graveyard. But extremely good, especially The Image of a Drawn Sword, and well respected by his peers.

And I think Ronald Firbank, while a reasonably well known *name* is v little read these days despite being moderately significant in his connection between fin de siecle aestheticism and subsequent 20th C comic novels.

Ronald Firbank may go unread these days, but his offspring Butch Firbanks still looms large in his legend.

Hi bulb after bulb that was the series I embarked on the first book of and tbf I could have continued, it just didn't hold me at the time. I'm definitely interested in Snow for historical reasons if nothing else

Does anyone read Ben-Hur or Shepherd of the Hills anymore? Huge in turn of the century US.

How about The Robe for that matter.

Lloyd C. Douglas.

What was the name of the guy who wrote Seven Who Fled again? He was in the comeback kid mode around here for a hot minute.

The Flower Beneath the Foot
bulb after bulb
The Flower Beneath the Foot
bulb after bulb
*please don't change it
The Flower Beneath the Foot
bulb after bulb

Zane Grey? Louis L'amour?

(not answering James's question; just wondering if anyone still reads 'em)

What Are You Reading
The Flower Beneath The Foot
bulb after bulb

Grey L'Amour
Fall '22
bulb after bulb

James Gould Cozzens.

wow Winston Churchill really was a giant at the time

His first novel to appear in book form was The Celebrity (1898). However, Mr. Keegan's Elopement had been published in 1896 as a magazine serial and was republished as an illustrated hardback book in 1903. Churchill's next novel—Richard Carvel (1899) — was a phenomenal success. The novel was the third best-selling work of American fiction in 1899 and eighth-best in 1900, according to Alice Hackett's 70 Years of Best Sellers. It sold some two million copies in a nation of only 76 million people, and made Churchill rich. His other commercially successful novels included The Crisis (1901), The Crossing (1904), Coniston (1906), Mr. Crewe's Career (1908) and The Inside of the Cup (1913), all of which ranked first on the best-selling American novel list in the years indicated.[2]

That quote about novelists vanishing, when compared to musicians or filmmakers, rings pretty true. I wonder if a lot of it has to do with stylistically a lot of writing simply becoming unfashionable or dull compared to other eras, which might lean more into poetry or a sort of hardboiled realism, or working in a genre which has fallen into complete disfavor. For example I've got to believe there were so many writers of western novels which will never see the light of day again, whereas western films and music influenced by the west will always have a huge audience. L'Amour and Grey are obv largely unfashionable (maybe the latter has been since he was obliquely zinged in The Third Man) but they'll always be known.

Peter Benchley probably sticks around in the public consciousness exclusively due to Jaws. I'd be curious to see if Mario Puzo would have suffered a fate of being forgotten, too, if The Godfather was never filmed.

Michael Swanwick wrote a pamphlet-length essay on why Cabell's reputation fell. Swanwick's theory was that the uniform edition did it. Cabell collected all of his very uneven books into a series, and tried to force all the stories into a common legendarium. (Heinlein was influenced a lot by Cabell, and tried doing the same.) The simpler explanation is that the world after 1929 got too serious for Cabell's brand of ironic comedy, and he starved his imagination by temperament and circumstance. The same happened to Flann O'Brien, who was also influenced by Cabell.

I read Cabell as a boy, which is the only time for that. The oldest member of my family saw me doing so and said, "Well, well, well. So Cabell is still read."

Cabell disappoints but in real life he was brilliant. He was a prodigy in classical languages and was asked give lectures in college while still in his teens. (Unfortunately his emotional development stopped there.) A few years later the Teddy Roosevelt administration tapped him for a career in the diplomatic service. He would have been ideal for that (he had the languages, the intellect, and the polite obnoxiousness) but in those days diplomats had to be independently wealthy and Cabell wasn't.

I remember Spider Robinson from the same period, but found him unreadable even then. Cabell was extremely limited, but within his narrow bounds he had wit. Robinson didn't even come up to Douglas Adams standards. Robinson was the guy you must have met once, who makes a play on words for no reason and laughs uproariously at his own joke. Or takes a familiar song, changes one thing in the lyrics to something different, and then sings the entire song to you. Later he had a sort of fan culture in the days of Usenet. ("alt.callahans." I never spent any time there, but a woman I loved did, which was awkward.)

Cabell's close friend was the writer Joseph Hergesheimer, who was also acclaimed in the 1910s and 20s. Hergesheimer was famous for his stories of emotional drama among the very rich. He wasn't very rich himself, but he made money and bought a large country house. The Depression killed his career too. (In a letter in old age, Cabell answered his correspondent's question. "Hergesheimer? I seem faintly to recall the name.")

I thought about Zane Grey earlier but would guess there's cowboy afficionados out there

Thought about Jacqueline Susann too but same rules apply I guess, still historically noteworthy

Ben Hur vs. Quo Vadis FITE

But Flann O'Brien is still very popular! In ILx circles anyways

Flann O'Brien will never not be read.

What was the name of the guy who wrote _Seven Who Fled_ again? He was in the comeback kid mode around here for a hot minute.

(not answering James's question; just wondering if anyone still reads 'em)

― Les hommes de bonbons (cryptosicko)

sort of a related question that one, _genres_ that have fallen out of favor probably they have at least niche followings. i was at powell's i think before the pandemic and they had a whole section, for instance, of nautical adventures. i think my brother read some of the horatio hornblower books. he's kind of big on old niche fiction, he's really into doc savage. i didn't know nautical fiction was an entire genre, though i guess it stands to reason.

i'm actually half-heartedly reading a harlequin romance now! _for the love of april french_ by a lady named penny aimes. my mom read harlequin romances by the bushel when i was young - i never touched them myself, they were For Girls, so i don't know how _for the love of april french_ stacks up, but i can _definitely_ see the appeal. only reason i haven't finished it is because all of my leisure reading tends to be dour nonfiction books about genocide and for some reason i've stopped enjoying reading for leisure as much as i used to. april french is pure fantasy - it's about a trans woman (of course, because i am a cliche) who meets a cis guy who isn't a chaser, an egg, or otherwise a fucking asshole but who is nevertheless into her. aside from that it was actually super relatable to my own life, which i can't imagine would be true about '80s harlequin romances. the titular april french is sort of a den mom at a local bdsm club, who by day works a job that's _very_ similar to my own, even considering that there are like three or four careers that have historically been open to trans women.

anyway. my feeling - and again i haven't read any '80s harlequin romances so i can't confirm - is that the idea of a "harlequin romance novel" has changed to adapt with the times, and that while the romance novel is probably even more of a niche concern than it was previously - nowadays i suspect that ao3 fills a lot of the niche that harlequin used to fill - there's certainly good quality writing still being put out by harlequin.

Flann O'Brien will never not be read.

I wasn't proposing Flann O'Brien as a subject for this thread. O'Brien and Cabell were both stuck and couldn't renew their imaginations.

What about Henri Barbusse? Feel like he would be difficult and lack the cache of say Celine.

My best friend at high school was an obsessive reader of Alexander Kent novels, was he ever a big deal? Certainly wrote a lot of books, and he only died five years ago.

What about Henri Barbusse? Feel like he would be difficult and lack the cache of say Celine.

i didn't know nautical fiction was an entire genre

OCEANS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS

Poster Boy Arnold Bennett is a Penguin Classics kind of guy, so while this definitely disqualifies for Type I Unread, not sure about Type II Unread. Maybe Type II should have subdivisions of the clade: Type IIa- famous for being unread, but still read and in print, Type IIb - unread and unknown by most but still in print but a publisher you know etc.

definitely need some empsonian classifications of that sort.