What authors writing today will someday be shelved in the "Classics" section?

[AuntiePam]

I think Stewart O’Nan’s work is deep and diverse enough to warrant consideration, but he hasn’t had a breakthrough book. I don’t know what it would take. Everybody who reads him likes him (even the critics) but he’s under the radar, so far.

[astorian]

@Scupper

Nonsense, as far as Vonnegut goes. I can’t speak to Ayn Rand, having zero familiarity there, but Vonnegut holds up perfectly well, thank you. Mother Night still cuts like a razor, for starters.

“Not for everyone,” may apply here as well as anywhere, but I’d need a lot of convincing before I’d take Vonnegut off the list of classics.

I understand perfectly well that Vonnegut has his passionate admirers, as does Ayn Rand. Each author’s fans can (and will) explain at great length why they’re worthy of a place on the all-time classics list. But in the end, neither will ever win the approval of a majority (or even a sizable plurality) of readers.

I’m quite prepared to believe that, 100 years from now, both Vonnegut and Rand will still have ardent admirers… but not nearly enough to make either part of any widely recognized canon.

And again, MY favorite authors won’t be part of any such canon either. The world has changed. There are too many vastly different groups of readers with too many vastly different preferences. In the year 3000, a group of Columbia professors trying to come up with a list of the must-read books of our era will have a hell of a time coming to any kind of agreement.

[Maserschmidt]

@astorian

Even people who HATE Shakespeare and Dante would probably agree that you’re not truly an educated person if you haven’t read Hamlet and The Divine Comedy.

So, are there any modern, contemporary authors who’ll achieve that kind of status? No, not a chance. Even Kurt Vonnegut’s most passionate fans will never be able to argue with a straight face that, “You’re not truly an educated person if you haven’t read God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.”

You compared the best of one to the near-worst of another. The reality is that being part of the canon only requires one good book. I liked all of Salinger, for example, but only Catcher makes any lists. At the other extreme, even Shakespeare’s output includes plays that only get read by completists (e.g. Troilus & Cressida).

For fiction I’m hard pressed to say there will be any canon going forward, since publishing has gotten so prolific, so diverse, and books are now easily distributed internationally. There are a couple of books I’d like to think will be covered in many classes years from now (100 Years of Solitude; Angle of Repose; A Very Long Engagement) but I don’t think that’ll happen. I used to think The Tin Drum might be such a book, but now I don’t think so.

[Night_so_be_it]

How can you say the canon’s been frozen for a century? Utter nonsense. There are plenty of canonised authors of the last century. Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, Stevens, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Pynchon. Even Nathanael West’s in there. Lorca. Neruda. I could go on.