I came in to post **Haruki Murakami **- a personal fave whose style is timeless, engrossing and technically well-executed - well, read in translation, that is…
I would add J.M. Coetzee, if only for Disgrace, one of the finest novels I have ever read. Technically brilliant and moving on a number of levels.
I would add the recently-deceased **David Foster Wallace **- his suicide has led to a review of his work and many authors - including Eggers, Chabon, and other McSweeney’s insiders - to state what an influence he was on them.
I have no problem with King being on the list - or Rowling - simply due to the cultural impact that their books have had over long periods of time. I find a number of enduring writers are necessarily brilliant technical writers, like, say, Coetzee is. I am a huge Steinbeck fan, but would argue that his writing doesn’t keep pace with his story-telling and insight into human behavior…
Has Gabriel Garcia Marquez beeing mentioned yet?
I also wonder if Philip Roth’s work - or his WASP equivalent, John Updike - will endure…
I hope that students down the ages will be spared the Baroque Cycle. What a tedious set of books. The Diamond Age (which I love) will not age well. Sci Fi does not age well. When the future comes it is not like that predicted in the books. So the books seem old and quaint. The don’t have the insight into society of the day that the classics that we read now have to the time in which they were written.
The writer of the second half of the 20th century whose works will remain classics the longest is …
Dr. Seuss
The ideas. The language. The plots. The zapegoozols. He had it all.
(My sister teaches in elementary school and has hundreds of books in her class. Years ago, someone broke into her class and stole several things. Didn’t steal any books, except for ALL her Dr. Seuss books)
There won’t be many, but among them the strongest contenders are: Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo. Maybe Alice Munro. Maybe David Foster Wallace, but probably not. Maybe William T. Vollmann. Maybe Cynthia Ozick. I’d like to say Steven Millhauser, but I doubt it. Same with Alasdair Gray. Same with Louise Gluck. Maybe John Ashbery. Maybe Elizabeth Bishop.
People like King, Rowling, etc., will not last. Not as ‘classic literature’, anyway.
Another vote for King; I doubt all of his books will stay in print (though copies will always be easily obtained) but at his best he’s brilliant. Supernatural stuff aside, he is to mid/late 20th century Maine what O’Connor was to 20th century Georgia or- at risk of blasphemy- what Twain was to mid 19th century Missouri.
I also think Harry Potter will remain big in the way that Mary Poppins and Peter Pan have done. If Rowling never writes another word other than essays on “Why I support terrorists and hate kittens” there’s too much nostalgia for Potter to go away, and for Y.A. reading he’s top notch.
Anne Tyler is another ‘regional’ author whose better works will remain big. Searching for Caleb and Accidental Tourist are probably both my top 25"favorite books" list and among the few novels I re-read periodically.
I think Neal Stephenson might be well remembered for quite a while, and I also think his greatest book is still in him.
I’m trying to think of any writers of historical fiction who I believe will be read when they’re dead and none come to mind. I suppose it’s the “Write what you know” rules applying. Likewise I seriously doubt that anything currently in print by living authors and focused on vampires will be so in a few years and that the glut of vampire authors might be the “Flock of Seagulls” haircut or leisure suit or lava lamp/hippie beads when future sitcoms do comedic flashbacks to this era. Most will go the way of Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins, Frank Yerby, Sidney Sheldon and Jacqueline Susann [i.e. immensely popular gazillion copy selling authors who are mostly out of print very soon after their deaths {Susann’s books were recently reissued after a long period of being o.o.p.}).
Wow. Your O’Connor reading software is bustit. O’Connor is one of a very short list of authors who should’ve gotten a Nobel prize, if it weren’t for that pesky rule against posthumous recipients; King is the bottom of the bottom of the nastiest trash barrel. They’re not in the same universe. King’s horrors are misanthropic, sadistic wallowings in the worst aspects of stunted humanity; O’Connors horrors are about how big the universe is and how we fit in it.
I get that a lot of people don’t get a lot out of O’Connor, but to compare Stephen King to Flannery O’Connor is just about the most outrageous travesty I’ve ever come across in this forum.
Oh that’s utter bullshit. I would never compare O’Connor to King, but that’s because O’Connor’s horrors often require a lot of work to ‘explain’ them, and the redemption in her stories is only vaguely clear. King on the other hand has lots of cookie-cutter, but non-misanthropic, redemption, via man’s faith in himself and god.
Actually, to elaborate, King’s “redemptions” are tacked on and incongruous; beyond being cliche, they don’t ring true. What his stories are actually about is his soul-deep self-loathing, projected onto the rest of humanity.
I’ve always thought that Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk had way more aphorisms and symbolism than a lot of the “classics”, and is actually a fun read for adolescent males. Secretly, I hope this book someday makes the classics list.
De gustibus non est disputandum. I’m not a huge fan of most of King’s supernatural horror novels (when it comes to supernatural horror he can’t end a story to save his life), but The Body, Dolores Claiborne (brilliant use of dialect and the only thing supernatural being the “meanwhile in Gerald’s Game” moment [it was to be released in a single volume with GG]), and even Carrie and Salem’s Lot when read allegorically would make a dent in O’Connor. The characters are no more grotesque, far more likable (does O’Connor have any likable protagonists?) and a lot less ideological than so much of Peacock Woman, and when he does use the supernatural at least it’s not Irish Catholic mysticism (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
While I don’t like anything Coupland has written sinceGeneration X save for a few essays, I think his first and flagship book will survive for another generation.
Umberto Eco will most certainly be around for a long long time.
