I started this thread partly in the hopes of getting suggestions for books to read–I’m a voracious reader. I shall be checking inter-library loan to see if I can get some of the ones that have been mentioned here.
“Who is John Galsworthy?”
One of the reasons that it was such a biggie in its day was that the characters were based on real-life celebrities.
The # 1 New York Times Bestseller by John Bear. I own that and it is good.
[QUOTE=Don Draper]
“Valley of the Dolls” … seemed like the single-most aimless, pointless, go-nowhere story I ever read …
[/QUOTE]
That and the fact that its depictions of sex were shocking to a culture that was just emerging from hundreds of years of repression. In fact, both Jacqueline Susann and the previously mentioned Harold Robbins represented two sides of the same coin–a genre that can be called “Rich and Beautiful People Fucking”. Of course, as sex in mainstream pop culture became more common and the thinly-veiled celebrities became forgotten, most people came to see these books as badly-written cliché-storms featuring shallow undeveloped characters who were little more than cartoons.*
*Incidentally, I’m using the term “cartoons” only in the sense that Susann’s and Robbins’ characters were two-dimensional. There are actually many cartoon characters who are a lot more interersting and better-developed than anyone depicted in a novel by those two.
According to Wikipedia, Edward Bellamy’s book “Looking Backward” was the third-largest best-seller at the time after “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Ben-Hur”. It even sprouted a political movement, but it’s pretty much forgotten now.
John Gunther is almost unknown now, except for his classic “Death Be Not Proud”.
John Creasey’s J.J. Marric’s Gideon series are good British police procedurals. Not high art, but a pleasant read. Another author continued this series for a few years after Creasey’s 1976 death. There is a humorous British mystery author of the '60s named Joyce Porter: I don’t know if she’s written more than the Dover series. There’s an edgy British author that was very popular in the '90s named Liza Cody. She has two series. The Anna Lee mysteries were turned into a British TV series, but the other series is better. The first title of that series is Bucket Nut.
If you are more high-brow, I’d recommend Japanese Inn, by Oliver Statler. He wasn’t prolific, but is unjustly forgotten.
Maybe there was another one, but I remember the one that used the NYTimes lists. I also don’t remember the name of the book. I’m sure it was something really simple and descriptive.
Would you count James Michener? Another Pulitzer Prize-winner, author of 40-some books, mostly historical sagas (Centennial, Hawaii), gave more than $100 million to charities during his lifetime, due to lots of best-sellers. Anybody read them today?
Kind of like Edna Ferber only more recent.
Feh. The best things about the Illuminatus books were the appendices. The books were well-researched and I was able to find most of the original sources in print or, in one case, on microfiche. These led me elsewhere assembling a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory and I found that Foucault’s Pendulum was not very “accurate.” Pabulum for CT newbies.
Whatever happened to Franklin W. Dixon?
I know one of her minor heirs. She is always happy to see Showboat or some such get a revival on Broadway - she gets a modest little royalty check ;).
Ike Witt knows this, but just in case other people don’t: Franklin W. Dixon was one of the many pseudonyms used by the Stratemeyer Syndicate:
Danielle Steel is already slowly dropping off the radar. She’s still popular, there’s no denying that, but she’s nowhere near as big as she was in the 80s and 90s.
True, unless you make it to “classic” or “cult” status. A lot of the examples being given are just the normal to-be-expected phenomenon of changing public taste and a particular author’s “time” passing. Popular fiction contrasts with, for example, popular music in that in the latter case if you were big once, 25 years later you may be regularly playlisted on the Oldies station and doing smaller gigs playing the Big Hits and a few new tracks nobody cares about, for the old fans. Not as easy for a novelist.
Also, even with prolific big-name authors, it is not uncommon to only be remembered for one major piece or series, as opposed to for the entire body of work (e.g. the Perry Mason example).
(Besides, if we’re talking prolific, ISTM many the *most *prolific authors are the genre fiction types cranking up a new mystery-romance or action-fantasy twice a year, that get their bills paid but whose names are not and will never be public celebrities.)
Yes! She and Amanda Quick; also Mary Higgins Clark.
Many of the “forgotten” authors named in this thread have at least some of their works available in ebook editions. Amazon has six Arthur Hailey books in their Kindle store, including Airport and Hotel. I found thirteen Irving Wallace books available for Kindle, five Jacqueline Susann books (including Valley of the Dolls), and lots of Harold Robbins. Peyton Place and Return to Peyton Place are available in Kindle format too. Not too shabby for a bunch of authors who have faded into obscurity.
When I saw this thread, the first name that popped into my head was Alistair MacLean. That guy was a blockbuster machine in the 60s and 70s, but I can’t remember the last time I heard his name or saw one of his books in a bookstore. Checked Amazon, and yep, it looks like you can read everything he ever wrote on your Kindle–including plenty of titles I had never heard of.
I don’t know if it’s the same thing, but after the publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe, there were quite a few “Anti-Tom novels”. They generally depicted slaves as happy, naive people, far better off than northern workers starving or freezing with their factory jobs, or lack of. At least half of these were written by women
MacLean also had a LOT of his books turned into films in the 1860s and 1970s, and many of those films are well-remembered. I suspect that is keeping MacLean from obscurity. After all, he wrote the books that became:
The Guns of Navarone
Ice Station Zebra (Howard Hughes’ favorite!)
Force 10 from Navarone
Where Eagles Dare
Breakheart Pass (Charles Bronson Western)
and the less-well-known
The Satan Bug
Puppet on a Chain
When Eight Bells Toll
and ten others.
All told, Maclean has had an impressive number of his thrillers turned into films. He’s way past Clive Cussler (who I predict will Fade Into Obscurity after he dies) and up into Ian Fleming territory.