Caravaggio? He had some fame in his lifetime. But he was also just as notorious as a thug.
I went to a Caravaggio exhibition in Rome in 2010. It was a month-long exhibition. Yet there was a queue sneaking around the block on a Wednesday night. I imagine he would have been astonished. Then, he would have mugged the old people at the end of the queue.
The comments about PKD are interesting.
Yes, I was thinking about Kafka and Caravaggio, one because he kept his work to himself, and the other because of his reputation while alive. But each did new things with their art that were ahead of their time.
Shalmanese, yes, Hayek does seem to fit, doesn’t he? His approach to economics and governance has gotten more prominent. As for Rand, sigh. The L. Ron Hubbard of economic science fiction.
There is something of a cult around Ernie Bushmiller. Also Fletcher Hanks and Boody Rogers, but their name recognition is much lesser.
I think that any of his contemporaries would be astonished of the success of William Shakespeare .
And what about Nostradamus?
Jim Thompson, author of The Grifters, is in the literary pantheon of Great Writers and Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird, Being There) is not. I bet most people thought it would go the other way.
Iceberg Slim and Ralph Ellison attended Tuskegee Institute at the same time. Ellison is the better-regarded writer of the two, though Josh Alan Friedman makes a convincing case that he shouldn’t be.
I’m pretty sure that the creator of Captain America is every bit as famous as Jack Kirby. 
No one could have predicted that!
John Kennedy Toole would have received puzzled looks of “who?” by his contemporaries since he only published his first book post-humorously. That book was A Confederacy of Dunces and would go on to sell 1.5 million copies and win a Pulitzer.
Youndo have his rival and friend Ben Jonson writing in the First Folio seven years after his death “Not of an age but for all time”. Whether that was “speak well of the dead” or not, I don’t know. But still read and performed 500 years later…I can see your point.
I picked up a collection of his pulp novels. Holy Sh*t I was not disappointed. The man can surely spin a tale.
I’m not sure I agree with this at all. If you read Dick’s published work, most of his science fiction reads like a lot of other stuff from the time he was publishing. Plenty of that was dystopian. Where Dick got weird was in his use of is it real? and paranoia, but there was a lot of that in literature, too. William Burroughs was pushing those themes as well. And, I think, much farther than Dick did. He was certainly weirder.
If you told people then that Dick would loom large, with many of his works adapted as movies, the main reason they’d shake their heads would be to ask “Why him?”, instead of any number of his peers they could name.
If you think that the works of Dick that have been adapted as film are really far outside the mainstream, then go and read Second Variety or Paycheck or [Minority Report* or even Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? They ain’t all that weird, and the reality-questioning themes are the creation of filmmakers or even of fanwanking after the film’s release.
(But A Scanner Darkly really is weird from the get-go, I have to grant. Maybe someday somebody will film Ubik, too. )