Elizabeth Goudge. She wrote a bunch of best sellers; JK Rowling cites her as an influence. By 1993, a novel of hers was plagiarized - published, well-reviewed, and it took the world a month to realize it was completely stolen from her 1956 book.
According to this story, Harper re-released all the MacLean books in print in 2009:
Who besides me has heard of, never mind read anything by, Vardis Fisher?
You can’t give her books away. The same thing is true for Dick Francis.
Some things never change, do they? 150 years later, we’re being bombarded with dystopian teen fiction.
I was going to mention him, but you beat me to it. I was a huge Michener fan. I’m sure I haven’t read all 40 of his books, I should look them up.
Upton Sinclair is remembered for The Jungle, but he wrote the highly popular Lanny Bud series of novels as well:
One even won a Pulitzer.
I had the displeasure of reading the first in high school (I think we had to read two novels by an author and compare them. I read The Jungle and World’s End). Absolutely ridiculous, hyperbolic crap (The Jungle is not a very good novel, either, although it does have historical importance).
As for what will last in the future, I highly doubt that King and Rowling are going to be read. I think the key for any author to survive is for the datedness itself to be appreciated. For example, Elizabethan English happens to sound cool to our ear, and Shakespeare’s plays portray an “old world” that is interesting for that reason. Similarly, the gentility of Jane Austen’s language and characters happens to work in her favor.
Although I like some of King’s short stories, he portrays a lower-class world of the 70s and 80s that I doubt is going to be all that appealing in the future.
Rowling is going to be undone for a different set of reasons. The first few Harry Potter books are truly children’s books. They built a fan base that then grew up with the books, which increasingly became more sophisticated. But series after that is still uneven in quality. So I think people in the future are going to be unwilling to get into such a mixed bag. They’ll know Harry Potter from the movies, which also will probably not maintain their popularity for very long.
As another poster pointed out, music tends to age well on average, and literature does not.
^I have to agree with you about Stephen King. The more pop references and brand names which are shoehorned into a book the faster it will become dated.
I don’t think so with Harry Potter. 95% of the book is set in a timeless location; however, when British boarding schools fade from common acquaintance, then Potter might fade away.
I’ve had two seperate people bring up the book Space in seperate conversations in the last two weeks, so anecdotally he isn’t obscure. More concretely, several of his more popular books have recent editions, so I don’t think he counts either.
I seriously doubt most of the people reading Harry Potter have any experience, even second hand, of British Boarding schools. I suspect the books will live on simply because the generation that grew up reading them will have kids of their own, and want to have them read them.
I remember reading everything of Charlotte Armstrong’s that I could get my hands on, but I haven’t heard her name mentioned in a long time. I see Amazon does have four of her books available on Kindle, but she wrote a lot more than that.
I’ve been checking out novels that were made into classic Hollywood films.
Sinclair Lewis wrote* Dodsworth*. Lewis is not forgotten–he’s on The Official List of American Authors. But he’s not a star in his own right like Fitzgerald or Hemingway. I enjoyed meeting the Dodsworth of the book even more than the one in the film; Lewis even tells us he’s “no Babbitt.”
James Hilton was very big in his day & also had novels turned into movies. His Random Harvest has more politics & less schmoop than the film version.
Next up: Now Voyager by Olive Higgens Prouty. Who wrote a series of “Vale Novels.”
Most of these books are available cheaply–in print or Kindle format. And most are called “middlebrow”–even the one by Sinclair Lewis.
In fact, there’s a middlebrow genre called “Gothic/Parodic.” Which includes Cold Comfort Farm,* I Capture the Castle* & Molly Keane’s Devoted Ladies; all personal favorites. The first of this genre might be Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen did not handle Deep Issues; she wrote domestic novels about family issues & the quest for good marriages. But she did it so well that she escaped obscurity…
What some people don’t realize is that we’re already on a second generation of Harry Potter readers. The first novel was released nearly 20 years ago and the kids that fell in love with it in the first place are, at the very youngest, in their mid-20s now. Some are even a little bit older and have begun to introduce Harry Potter to their own kids.
Harry Potter will endure like The Wizard of Oz, Willy Wonka, and Huck Finn have endured.
Sprawling historical romances, Anti-Communist/Establishment potboilers, Traditionalist Catholic Biblical epics, New Agey reincarnationist memories of past lives & Atlantis - in the late 70s-early 80s, bookstores would have an entire display of this stuff - all by Taylor Caldwell. Now she has three novels which tend to float in & out of print- Dear and Glorious Physician (about St. Luke, and one of my favorite novels), Captains and the Kings (a 1970s NBC miniseries about a Kennedy-esque political family running with & then afoul of a Council on Foreign Relations-esque conspiracy), and Testimony of Two Men (a syndicated 1970s TV miniseries that I vaguely remember except that it was post-Civil War & involved a physician falsely accused of being an abortionist.)
A look at Amazon shows that her Dialogues with the Devil (just what it says) and Romance of Atlantis (ditto) are also in print in pricey HBs.
Btw, she also was a member of the John Birch Sociey and Liberty Lobby, but did not seem to share the anti-Semitism/Holocaust revisionism that the latter became famous for.
Lloyd C. Douglas. Wrote The Robe and Magnificent Obsession (made into movies), and several other popular books.
Erskine Caldwell. Wrote Tobacco Road, God’s Little Acre and Claudelle Inglish (all made into movies) and 22 other novels from 1929 to 1973, as well as 150 short stories. A few years ago, Slate wrote this:
I’ve never ready any of his works or even seen the movies. My only contacts with him have been indirect. I’ve listened to Shelly Berman mentioning him seemingly admiringly in a brief tangent to his airlines routine, and I read James Thurber’s short (and funny) parody of Caldwell, “Bateman Comes Home”.
My family had a pb copy ofJesus Came Again: A Parable. I think I read a few pages, but that’s all.
Really? I read it in high school and liked it a lot. Recently I got it from the library to reread. I disliked it so much I could barely get through it.
Kenneth Roberts? Historical novelist popular in the 30s-50s. Northwest Passage is probably his most famous book. I read Boon Island, about a shipwreck on a barren rock in winter and I tell you, I could not put it down. Based on a true story. Excellent writer.
At the other end of the spectrum, at a yard sale I came across a stack of paperbacks by Helen MacInnes whom I vaguely knew as a suspense writer of the 50s-60s, European settings mostly. As a joke I bought them all for $3, there were about 15 books, and started reading them. omg, the woman was as right wing as they come. Wiki describes her as an espionage novelist. Her world was *very *black and white and in the end, not even good for a joke.
Eh, Lost Horizon and Mr Chips are still read. And even if they haven’t read the former, most people have probably heard of Shangra-La
Both movies recently aired on TCM, too.
Frank Slaughter is another once-prolific author who appears to be largely forgotten. He wrote medical thrillers in the 50s and 60s.
Just sold a paperback of “Tobacco Road”, too! Might have been required reading for a class; IDK.
I predict that the people who wrote the “Left Behind” series will be largely forgotten in a decade or two also. May be wrong, of course.
Anything by ‘Ouida’ or the Baroness Orzcy.
Some things never change, do they? 150 years later, we’re being bombarded with dystopian teen fiction.
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Sorry, what’s the connection here?