DEFINITELY Thomas Harris and Tom Clancy would be top of my list
Every famous SF writer starting with Jules Verne and on to modern day.
Every famous Fantasy writer starting with The Iliad, moving on to the King Arthur crew in the 1200’s, the 1001 Nights, JRR Tolkien, and on to modern day.
Every famous mystery author from Poe and Doyle on to modern day.
Every horror writer from the Brothers Grimm, Mary Shelly, and on to modern day.
What you seem to be saying is either:
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No masterpiece has ever appeared in any of those genres, or
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According to mainstream book reviewers, no masterpeice has ever appeared in any of those genres.
(1) is patently untrue. (2) I could believe, maybe.
Door number three:
The likelihood that a book, which has lasted based entirely on its ability to move/entertain people, will be considered a masterpiece is directly related to its age and ability to last. Saying Roger Zelazney’s Amber series isn’t worthy of lasting a thousand years may be true or it may be because it isn’t old and arcane, it doesn’t come in hardback, and the author is only newly dead–and that’s the way we’ve been told to separate what is worthy from what is just “crude entertainment.” We don’t really have any way of judging it. But if people keep wanting to read it for centuries and centuries while other books that would be by modern day standards considered similar mere paperback fantasies all disappear–what reason do we have to believe that we aren’t simply being snobs?
Bartleby tells of the great emptiness of witnessing the power and passion available in words to be squandered or wasted on things material or discarded or lost. However, while as Bartleby simply presents us with an image of a man who has lost all fantasy, The Neverending Story provides a complete and logical discourse as to the varying plusses and minuses of this use of words. Ende discourses on the power to spread knowledge to mankind–and how the misuse of words can cause an end to creative individual thought and the trust of one another (probably in reference to WWII or Communism.) And in the latter half he takes us through a purposeful demonstration of how a story and experiencing the choices of the main character can help a person become a better person.
Both stories use symbolism and story to relate an opinion they had, and done in such a way that it is both enjoyable and thought provoking. The only difference being that one wrote popular childrens stories while the other was a cynical starving artist. Certainly Melville had better prose. but if both authors go on to be read for hundreds of years more, why are we to believe that in real terms the ability to write a pretty sentence should rank higher than the ability to lift people up and make them be lost in fantasy. And if both write presenting ideas of equal caliber and formulated into a fantasy world just as perfect for playing that idea out such that people can feel it even if they don’t necessarily get it–why should we think one a less rigorous thinker than the other?
Would anyone ever think to nominate the comic, Watchmen, or anything by Yukito Kishiro for the Nobel Prize for literature? Irregardless of whether these works could be argued to be truly that good–would anyone in the modern world even be able to look on a comic and even enter it into the same list as books without pictures and just as worthy provided the content?
Simply so far as I can tell, anyone saying that something which humans have kept around for all that long (and with increasing probability as the work is older) is schlock is most likely missing what talent it was that the author had and why those works are an impressive display of all the skill that person brought to the table that millions of others never could.
Sage Rat, after reading that discourse, I still find myself… not completely enlightened. In post #22, it looked like you were saying that everything in the genres of SF, fantasy, mystery, and horror, was an example of the “non-enduring masterpieces” that the OP was asking for—i.e. that there have been no masterpieces in any of these genres. If that’s not what you were saying, what were you saying?
No, I was being facetious there.
My simplistic assumption in starting this thread was that things could roughly be divided into masterpieces and non-masterpieces. In the latter category, you have all kinds of stuff, from the schlocky, evanescent, and just plain awful, to the stuff that actually endures, for a number of different reasons, the primary reason being that people enjoy reading it, and will continue to enjoy reading it. That’s not to say there can’t be other reasons for endurance. Ayn Rand, for example, does not to my mind make for enjoyable reading, and her literary qualities fall somewhere south of the average Harlequin – but the political ground she stakes out, such as it is, makes her work endure. So no, I don’t think endurance alone makes something a masterpiece. A “classic,” maybe.
Well Rand has only had forty years or so. There’s no saying that she isn’t still just living out her alotted time for cliqueness. Freud lasted a lot longer before everyone realised he had no idea what he was talking about, and is still dying off. Freud I envision won’t last as much beyond an interesting figure in the history of psychology and last based on his historical merit rather than on the fact that people just keep reading him. As an author I thought Rand was decent as it goes (Atlas Shrugged) but if she carries on it will be for her philosophy more than her writing I would imagine. Even today, I think she is mostly read as a philosopher/political mind rather than as a story writer. Though I guess we shall see in two thousand years.
Anyways apologies for waylaying the thread. scampers off and hides