Very definitely Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — and not for the reason it’s controversial today. It was seen as irredeemably crude and unworthy of a good author. Louisa May Alcott (who lived in Concord, MA) condemned the book :
Not coincidentally, the book was banned from the Concord public library
Says the Wikipedia article on it:
(I’ve been there to check – they now have several editions of Huckleberry Finn. And of Louisa May Alcott’s books).
Nowadays the book is condemned for its depiction of slavery and use of the word “nigger”, which is pretty ironic considering that it’s the story of a boy from the antebellum South who learns for himself the evil of slavery and its effects.
It appears that The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne had a mixed reception at the time, before going on to be one of the more revered of English novels. (I was aware of Samuel Johnson’s unfortunate comment: “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last”).
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There has been a revival of interest in The Room by Tommy Wiseau, especially with the release of The Disaster Artist a few years ago. It’s still an awful film, but people revel in the awfulness.
Rocky Horror Picture Show was a bomb when released. It’s now a camp classic, even beyond the traditional midnight showings.
The Blues Brothers was anything but a flop.
I’d guess that a lot of popular 1980s era comedies would be currently reviewed with a bunch of “that’s so wrong and terrible” comments from modern younger reviewers. I don’t know if a separation should be made between reappraisals from critics who saw it at the time and now say “I thought it was good but it’s actually pretty crap” and times when you just have new critics viewing through a modern lens and objecting to content that was, at the time, acceptable in a movie.
Radiohead’s Kid A was not well received.
I have a possibly false memory of a rather harsh Rolling Stone review with barbs like “everything is in the wrong place,” “sounds like a marching band crashing into a brick wall,” and " airless and entombed in chrome"… But I recall a revision where they bumped up the star rating to four or five relatively quickly. I might be recalling it wrong tho.
At any rate, the initial reviews from other outlets were blunt and scathing.
OK, but this thread is more about critical opinion than box office.
Just for fun, here’s the other side of the coin - the guy who was THE hot ticket in the 1730s and onward in high society, when critics were busily slating Bach’s music: Johann Adolph Hasse. Seriously, for a while he was making (in contemporary terms) Michael Jacksonesque levels of money and hobnobbed with emperors. And then he got old and died and everyone moved on and forgot about him.
(I’d recommend his opera Cleofide if you’re into 18thC opera - I prefer the Capriccio recording with Emma Kirkby and Randall K Wong.)
I remember a joke in National Lampoon back around the time the movie came out.
Q: How many Blues Brothers does it take to make a funny movie?
A: Apparently more than two.
It’s interesting to look at old NYT bestseller lists of books to see who had staying power, and who didn’t - 50 years ago the list looked like this http://www.hawes.com/1969/1969-11-09.pdf: Philip Roth is still highly regarded, and Mario Puzo, Chaim Potok, and Jacqueline Susann are well known - but who is Gladys Rockmore Davis?
It’s a Wonderful Life wasn’t the critical bomb as the legends make it out to be, but it WAS considered kind of meh by most critics, and it’s a fact that it lost money on the initial release. As holiday movies go, Miracle on 34th Street (which was actually released in May) received a better response from critics, and won three Academy Awards (four nominations) while IAWL was 0 for 5.
And consider that Barbara Stanwyck’s Christmas in Connecticut, released in 1945, outgrossed both of them on its first release.
“The Searchers” is now a major critical darling; it is often cited as the greatest Western of all time, and one of the best movies ever.
Absolutely no one thought this when it came out. It was not regarded as an especially good movie by anyone. It was only after a few years when a few French auteurs, primarily Jean Luc Godard, claimed it was great a deep, and American critics who had dismissed it just a few years before rushed to agree and started appending interpretations and nuance to it that anyone suggested it was great.
Vincent Van Gogh was a total failure in his lifetime. I bet you he would have given yu one of his paintings for free. Today it would be worth millions
“The Searchers” is now a major critical darling; it is often cited as the greatest Western of all time, and one of the best movies ever.
Absolutely no one thought this when it came out. It was not regarded as an especially good movie by anyone. It was only after a few years when a few French auteurs, primarily Jean Luc Godard, claimed it was great and deep, and American critics who had dismissed it just a few years before rushed to agree and started appending interpretations and nuance to it, that anyone suggested it was great.
How about Brown Bunny? It famously had a premature release at Cannes, and Roger Ebert was at his scathing best. Later it was recut to better reflect the director’s wishes, and suddenly all the apparently interminable motorcycle racing, for example, made sense to the point where Ebert recanted his original criticism. The use of narrative devices for the time frame that slowly emerges was cleverly done. So was the repetition of the critical story beforethe audience knew what the critical story was.
The Great Gatsby was both a critical and commercial failure when it first came out. Fitzgerald was a young god because of his first novels but this failure almost destroyed his career, and possibly him.
Andy Warhol was reviled throughout his career, but his work as a whole now looks good in retrospect. I just visited the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and it was an impressive collection.
Same for Yoko Ono. Has anyone garnered more hate than her? But feminist critics have re-examined her work and found it original and meaningful. Again, I happened to see a retrospective of her work at the San Francisco MOMA and it converted me.
Science fiction as a genre was considered for decades to be fit only for sub-literates. The rockets and atomic bombs in WWII prompted a short-lived recognition in the early 1950s, and then the newer writers that developed in the 1960s forced admissions that it could have literary merit. But it still needs to be rediscovered every 20 years or so when the mainstream literary crowd suddenly “get it.”
It is famous that the speaker before Lincoln spoke for a long time, but I thought people right away recognized that Lincoln’s speech was a lot better.
When did the Gettysburg Address become widely known?
The most critically acclaimed and popular author of the 19th century US was Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth.
The best and most successful American author of the first decade of the 20th century was Winston Churchill, so much so that a UK politician asked permission to use his own name when writing. Of course, now the politician is a bit better known.
There are very few who have read either Southworth or Churchill these days. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The Stones’ Sticky Fingers was no critical darling, but now is regarded as one of their best and most defining albums, which means one of the best rock albums of all time. I especially remember having read Jon Landau’s scathing review from Rolling Stone about 20 years ago and being speechless that a guy I adored as a producer had thought so less of my favorite album.
ETA: especially this sequence bugs me, because Mick Taylor’s solo at the end of Sway is my all time favorite guitar solo: