7 ms·

Which Writers Will We Remember?

34 points by benbreen 3y ago

test77777 3y ago
I was just thinking about Micheal Lewis being for tech bros what Joan Didon was for hippies. Most of the time people are remembered for their era and not themselves.
zabzonk 3y ago
i think bellow may well be remembered - i've started reading augie march, and it is great so far - somewhat dickensian. but ayn rand and dorothy parker (who did make me laugh a bit)- definitely heading for time's great dustbin.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  You need to be sure to not confuse "I don't like it" with "No one likes it". Atlas Shrugged is still selling a hell of a lot of copies, > 65 years after it was published.
tiahura 3y ago
L. Ron Hubbard definitely. Mission Earth is without question the greatest dekology of all time.
- light_hue_1 3y ago
  He did manage to brainwash tens of thousands into an abusive insane alien cult that takes away their families, money, and sanity. So yeah. I guess they'll carry the torch of abuse forward into time.
karaterobot 3y ago
> Despite all this evidence, I’m actually not sure that Saul Bellow is a writer who is still going to be talked about 40, 50, 100 years from now I'm not sure what it means to ask which writers will be remembered. There isn't a monoculture anymore, and the prominence of the literary novel is a lot less than it was in 1973 anyway. So what does it mean to be remembered? What counts as being remembered? Setting that aside, none of the authors in that article will be remembered by everyone, but everyone he lists will be remembered by a small, passionate, connected community in 100 years, I can do everything short of guaranteeing that.
kriro 3y ago
Probably just the classics: K&R, Abelson/Sussman, Knuth, Sterling/Shapiro, Geoffrey James, Tanenbaum, Polya, Crockford, Stroustrup, Bentley, Russel/Norvig, Fall/Stevens. For fiction authors, I feel like I'm not an author kind of person. Tolkien had a big influence on me, same for Poe and Neal Stephenson. I don't really read a lot of the authors that are considered classics/great writers. If someone asked me if I'd rather never have read "The Great Gatsby" or "Silence of the Lamb", I'd readily purge Gatsby from my brain. I suppose the fiction author our generation will remember is xGPT.
AlbertCory 3y ago
The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a book I've read twice. I think the clean, tight simplicity of the story might make it live on, like O'Henry stories. But who TF knows? I have read some Nabokov, but I'd never even heard of Transparent Things, FWIW.
lazlee 3y ago
I hate to say it ... Stephen King.
- billfruit 3y ago
  Not that sure. Look at the best selling authors of the 1920s, they aren't widely known anymore.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    It's possible the film version of The Shining will have better recognition than the name Stephen King, in just a few decades. That's been the fate of a lot of once-ultra-popular early 20th century authors whose works were made into still-well-known films. Might happen to him, too.
    - JackFr 3y ago
      Edna Ferber. The movies Cimarron, Giant and Showboat definitely more well known than her novels on which they were based.
  - kaesar14 3y ago
    Well hasn’t he been a best selling author for 4 decades now?
  - lazlee 3y ago
    You under estimate the lasting power of a good ghost story. You need a good example? Edgar Allan Poe.
  - retrac 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_bestselling_novels_in_the_United_States_in_the_1920s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best... Sinclair Lewis has multiple titles listed - best-selling author of the 1920s - later a Nobel Prize winner in literature. I'm not familiar with a lot of those books, admittedly. But most books in the top 10 for those years are notable enough, that they have their own Wikipedia article. "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" in particular are highly influential works. They've had movies etc. made and are surely familiar titles to the average American, even if they may not have read them.
chilmers 3y ago
Every so often I stumble across the Wikipedia page of an author from the 19th or 20th century who was _hugely_ successful in their time, writing many bestselling books, and yet is almost totally forgotten now. They must have justifiably believed they had attained some kind of artistic immortality, yet it turned out not to be so (at least, probably not to the degree they expected — they do at least merit a Wikipedia entry, which is more than most of us will ever get).
- gumby 3y ago
  I remain astonished that Dickens has endured while Wilkie Collins has faded. The two were contemporaries, but Collins was much more famous and successful (and the inventor of the detective novel!). Yet hardly anyone reads even The Moonstone any more, while much of Dickens’ work is not only read but has become cultural touchstones (Scrooge, Oliver Twist, etc).
  - zabzonk 3y ago
    i am not at all astonished, at a uk grammar school in the 60s we were forced to read "the moonstone" for our eng.lit. o-level, at the same time as "great expectations" - guess which we liked more.
    - bsder 3y ago
      How bad is "The Moonstone" for you to like "Great Expectations" better? "Great Expectations" bored me to tears. "Tale of Two Cities" is an OK book with a terrible book taking up 2/3 of pages inserted in the middle. If Dickens hadn't written "A Christmas Carol," I don't think anybody would know who he is.
      - zabzonk 3y ago
        in my opinion GE is the great british novel. it takes a child through to an adult (very scarily at the start) in a really believable sequence, beautifully (and often very funnily) written. and both endings (there are two) make me cry. moonstone is a sub sherlock holmes detective story
gumby 3y ago
I read very little fiction by living authors. There’s an enormous volume, but a good filter is if the author is dead yet their books are still in print. Sure, I’ll miss some good books but it is impossible not to in the sheer torrent of volumes being published every day. But my filter increases the likelihood I’ll pick up something I’ll be glad to have read.
- disintegore 3y ago
  That's probably the best heuristic for finding quality stories nowadays. The publishers and their readership are stuck in a taste-affirming feedback loop and it seems most of the big literary awards are administered by people who have chosen representation activism as their primary reason for existing.
  - retrac 3y ago
    I would suggest reading reviews and literary critiques, written by authors you appreciate and respect. I rarely regret pursuing a book recommendation from someone whose own writing has engrossed me.
backtoyoujim 3y ago
I hope that the A.E. Stallings translation of Hesoid's "Work And Days" lasts for centuries. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36355637-works-and-days https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36355637-works-and-days It would show the future some portion of us as English speakers knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin. And since it is in heroic couplets it will offer a window into our pronunciation, syllabic emphasis, and vocabulary.
magnio 3y ago
One possibility are writers whose works are hard for GPT to emulate. IMO examples include Jhumpa Lahiri, Christopher Buehlman, and Walter M. Miller Jr.
23B1 3y ago
I think the better question is: which writers is Amazon killing by favoring popularity over discovery? A thousand rediscovered or newly discovered writers are buried every year by optimization for profit. If you actually want to broaden your horizons, you'll have to find an indie bookstore, tilt your head to the right, and let chaos take over while you browse.
- lolinder 3y ago
  It's not like publishing and receiving attention for books was easy before Amazon—most writers would never see publication in any format because the gatekeepers wouldn't let them through. Amazon's filter is different in that it's created a world where everyone can publish but few people get attention for it, but it's not obvious to me that their mechanisms are smothering creativity for profit any more than the large publishing houses did in the 20th century.
  - 23B1 3y ago
    I'm not talking about getting a book published, I'm talking about the joy of discovery, which can lead to success for authors who otherwise don't have the 'right' commercial approach (or the right skin color or background or gender). And what do I mean by success? Unique and special and important creative people living a sufficiently middle-class lifestyle to continue providing us with their gift(s). Amazon's filter has created a world where that is nigh on impossible. I can scan the spines of thousands of books at Powell's or Strand in an hour, with Mother Chaos guiding my hand, and come away with twenty new discoveries.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      > And what do I mean by success? Unique and special and important creative people living a sufficiently middle-class lifestyle to continue providing us with their gift(s). > Amazon's filter has created a world where that is nigh on impossible. You haven't really addressed my main point, which is that this kind of outcome was always a rarity—before Amazon the filter was the publishing houses. If you couldn't persuade them you were worth publishing, then you didn't get to share. Period. Amazon first created a world where literally everyone can publish anything they want. They then had to create filters to help people actually find what they're looking for in that deluge of content. The result might be that it's harder to find new content, but that's not because it's harder to make a living publishing good books.
milliams 3y ago
“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.” ― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
blockwriter 3y ago
These estimates seem weighted toward the reality that books are simply not read, and it is a meta-rationale, like the book's relevance to some theme that is perpetually bandied about in our political discourse, that is a more reliable vehicle for relevance. If books do end up being read again, and if therefore the individual merits predominate our perception, appreciation, and institution of these works, then the list would not be appropriately calibrated. As of now, it might be more right than wrong. It's not sad. It's not not sad. It's just the way it is.
- LanceH 3y ago
  > relevance to some theme that is perpetually bandied about in our political discourse, that is a more reliable vehicle for relevance. This is why Sir Mix-a-Lot's opus magnum will be played forever.
jamestimmins 3y ago
Surprised he doesn't mention that No Country For Old Men won the Oscar for Best Picture, and is generally considered a masterpiece. That alone seems like it would boost Cormac McCarthy's legacy considerably.
- ngetchell 3y ago
  As someone coming of age around the time of that movie, that was my first exposure to his work.
intalentive 3y ago
Another factor to consider is political climate and the character of the ruling class. Political and cultural changes can make some authors suddenly unfashionable.
progne 3y ago
LLMs could be great tools for measuring the impact of an author on the culture. They have the data to recognize when new concepts and motifs are introduced by a piece of literature and disperse forward in time through the culture. They can somewhat measure the breadth of the influence. You could build an index of the cultural impact of a source from zero to one, and rank them. It's a more direct and general measure of influence than citation count. It would be interesting to list the sources with the most impact but the least recognition. Does the dark matter of literature have a large pull?
derbOac 3y ago
I wrestle a bit with how relevant books will continue to be in the future at all. I way this not as someone who wants to see the demise of books, but more the opposite. It's difficult to read articles about the financial reality of book sales and distribution and not wonder what the future holds in general. Sometimes to me it seems as if modern celebrity in certain areas is due to fickle fate and social dynamics, popular attribution and cults of personality and so forth. I'm not saying there isnt real talent in there, but why some attain recognition and others not is often lost on me.

34 points by benbreen 3y ago

I was just thinking about Micheal Lewis being for tech bros what Joan Didon was for hippies. Most of the time people are remembered for their era and not themselves.

zabzonk 3y ago

i think bellow may well be remembered - i've started reading augie march, and it is great so far - somewhat dickensian. but ayn rand and dorothy parker (who did make me laugh a bit)- definitely heading for time's great dustbin.

Turing_Machine 3y ago
You need to be sure to not confuse "I don't like it" with "No one likes it". Atlas Shrugged is still selling a hell of a lot of copies, > 65 years after it was published.

tiahura 3y ago

L. Ron Hubbard definitely. Mission Earth is without question the greatest dekology of all time.

light_hue_1 3y ago
He did manage to brainwash tens of thousands into an abusive insane alien cult that takes away their families, money, and sanity. So yeah. I guess they'll carry the torch of abuse forward into time.

karaterobot 3y ago

> Despite all this evidence, I’m actually not sure that Saul Bellow is a writer who is still going to be talked about 40, 50, 100 years from now I'm not sure what it means to ask which writers will be remembered. There isn't a monoculture anymore, and the prominence of the literary novel is a lot less than it was in 1973 anyway. So what does it mean to be remembered? What counts as being remembered? Setting that aside, none of the authors in that article will be remembered by everyone, but everyone he lists will be remembered by a small, passionate, connected community in 100 years, I can do everything short of guaranteeing that.

kriro 3y ago

Probably just the classics: K&R, Abelson/Sussman, Knuth, Sterling/Shapiro, Geoffrey James, Tanenbaum, Polya, Crockford, Stroustrup, Bentley, Russel/Norvig, Fall/Stevens. For fiction authors, I feel like I'm not an author kind of person. Tolkien had a big influence on me, same for Poe and Neal Stephenson. I don't really read a lot of the authors that are considered classics/great writers. If someone asked me if I'd rather never have read "The Great Gatsby" or "Silence of the Lamb", I'd readily purge Gatsby from my brain. I suppose the fiction author our generation will remember is xGPT.

AlbertCory 3y ago

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a book I've read twice. I think the clean, tight simplicity of the story might make it live on, like O'Henry stories. But who TF knows? I have read some Nabokov, but I'd never even heard of Transparent Things, FWIW.

lazlee 3y ago

I hate to say it ... Stephen King.

billfruit 3y ago
Not that sure. Look at the best selling authors of the 1920s, they aren't widely known anymore.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  It's possible the film version of The Shining will have better recognition than the name Stephen King, in just a few decades. That's been the fate of a lot of once-ultra-popular early 20th century authors whose works were made into still-well-known films. Might happen to him, too.
  - JackFr 3y ago
    Edna Ferber. The movies Cimarron, Giant and Showboat definitely more well known than her novels on which they were based.
- kaesar14 3y ago
  Well hasn’t he been a best selling author for 4 decades now?
- lazlee 3y ago
  You under estimate the lasting power of a good ghost story. You need a good example? Edgar Allan Poe.
- retrac 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_bestselling_novels_in_the_United_States_in_the_1920s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best... Sinclair Lewis has multiple titles listed - best-selling author of the 1920s - later a Nobel Prize winner in literature. I'm not familiar with a lot of those books, admittedly. But most books in the top 10 for those years are notable enough, that they have their own Wikipedia article. "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" in particular are highly influential works. They've had movies etc. made and are surely familiar titles to the average American, even if they may not have read them.

chilmers 3y ago

Every so often I stumble across the Wikipedia page of an author from the 19th or 20th century who was _hugely_ successful in their time, writing many bestselling books, and yet is almost totally forgotten now. They must have justifiably believed they had attained some kind of artistic immortality, yet it turned out not to be so (at least, probably not to the degree they expected — they do at least merit a Wikipedia entry, which is more than most of us will ever get).

gumby 3y ago
I remain astonished that Dickens has endured while Wilkie Collins has faded. The two were contemporaries, but Collins was much more famous and successful (and the inventor of the detective novel!). Yet hardly anyone reads even The Moonstone any more, while much of Dickens’ work is not only read but has become cultural touchstones (Scrooge, Oliver Twist, etc).
- zabzonk 3y ago
  i am not at all astonished, at a uk grammar school in the 60s we were forced to read "the moonstone" for our eng.lit. o-level, at the same time as "great expectations" - guess which we liked more.
  - bsder 3y ago
    How bad is "The Moonstone" for you to like "Great Expectations" better? "Great Expectations" bored me to tears. "Tale of Two Cities" is an OK book with a terrible book taking up 2/3 of pages inserted in the middle. If Dickens hadn't written "A Christmas Carol," I don't think anybody would know who he is.
    - zabzonk 3y ago
      in my opinion GE is the great british novel. it takes a child through to an adult (very scarily at the start) in a really believable sequence, beautifully (and often very funnily) written. and both endings (there are two) make me cry. moonstone is a sub sherlock holmes detective story

gumby 3y ago

I read very little fiction by living authors. There’s an enormous volume, but a good filter is if the author is dead yet their books are still in print. Sure, I’ll miss some good books but it is impossible not to in the sheer torrent of volumes being published every day. But my filter increases the likelihood I’ll pick up something I’ll be glad to have read.

disintegore 3y ago
That's probably the best heuristic for finding quality stories nowadays. The publishers and their readership are stuck in a taste-affirming feedback loop and it seems most of the big literary awards are administered by people who have chosen representation activism as their primary reason for existing.
- retrac 3y ago
  I would suggest reading reviews and literary critiques, written by authors you appreciate and respect. I rarely regret pursuing a book recommendation from someone whose own writing has engrossed me.

backtoyoujim 3y ago

I hope that the A.E. Stallings translation of Hesoid's "Work And Days" lasts for centuries. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36355637-works-and-days https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36355637-works-and-days It would show the future some portion of us as English speakers knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin. And since it is in heroic couplets it will offer a window into our pronunciation, syllabic emphasis, and vocabulary.

magnio 3y ago

One possibility are writers whose works are hard for GPT to emulate. IMO examples include Jhumpa Lahiri, Christopher Buehlman, and Walter M. Miller Jr.

23B1 3y ago

I think the better question is: which writers is Amazon killing by favoring popularity over discovery? A thousand rediscovered or newly discovered writers are buried every year by optimization for profit. If you actually want to broaden your horizons, you'll have to find an indie bookstore, tilt your head to the right, and let chaos take over while you browse.

lolinder 3y ago
It's not like publishing and receiving attention for books was easy before Amazon—most writers would never see publication in any format because the gatekeepers wouldn't let them through. Amazon's filter is different in that it's created a world where everyone can publish but few people get attention for it, but it's not obvious to me that their mechanisms are smothering creativity for profit any more than the large publishing houses did in the 20th century.
- 23B1 3y ago
  I'm not talking about getting a book published, I'm talking about the joy of discovery, which can lead to success for authors who otherwise don't have the 'right' commercial approach (or the right skin color or background or gender). And what do I mean by success? Unique and special and important creative people living a sufficiently middle-class lifestyle to continue providing us with their gift(s). Amazon's filter has created a world where that is nigh on impossible. I can scan the spines of thousands of books at Powell's or Strand in an hour, with Mother Chaos guiding my hand, and come away with twenty new discoveries.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    > And what do I mean by success? Unique and special and important creative people living a sufficiently middle-class lifestyle to continue providing us with their gift(s). > Amazon's filter has created a world where that is nigh on impossible. You haven't really addressed my main point, which is that this kind of outcome was always a rarity—before Amazon the filter was the publishing houses. If you couldn't persuade them you were worth publishing, then you didn't get to share. Period. Amazon first created a world where literally everyone can publish anything they want. They then had to create filters to help people actually find what they're looking for in that deluge of content. The result might be that it's harder to find new content, but that's not because it's harder to make a living publishing good books.

milliams 3y ago

“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.” ― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

blockwriter 3y ago

These estimates seem weighted toward the reality that books are simply not read, and it is a meta-rationale, like the book's relevance to some theme that is perpetually bandied about in our political discourse, that is a more reliable vehicle for relevance. If books do end up being read again, and if therefore the individual merits predominate our perception, appreciation, and institution of these works, then the list would not be appropriately calibrated. As of now, it might be more right than wrong. It's not sad. It's not not sad. It's just the way it is.

LanceH 3y ago
> relevance to some theme that is perpetually bandied about in our political discourse, that is a more reliable vehicle for relevance. This is why Sir Mix-a-Lot's opus magnum will be played forever.

jamestimmins 3y ago

Surprised he doesn't mention that No Country For Old Men won the Oscar for Best Picture, and is generally considered a masterpiece. That alone seems like it would boost Cormac McCarthy's legacy considerably.

ngetchell 3y ago
As someone coming of age around the time of that movie, that was my first exposure to his work.

intalentive 3y ago

Another factor to consider is political climate and the character of the ruling class. Political and cultural changes can make some authors suddenly unfashionable.

progne 3y ago

LLMs could be great tools for measuring the impact of an author on the culture. They have the data to recognize when new concepts and motifs are introduced by a piece of literature and disperse forward in time through the culture. They can somewhat measure the breadth of the influence. You could build an index of the cultural impact of a source from zero to one, and rank them. It's a more direct and general measure of influence than citation count. It would be interesting to list the sources with the most impact but the least recognition. Does the dark matter of literature have a large pull?

derbOac 3y ago

I wrestle a bit with how relevant books will continue to be in the future at all. I way this not as someone who wants to see the demise of books, but more the opposite. It's difficult to read articles about the financial reality of book sales and distribution and not wonder what the future holds in general. Sometimes to me it seems as if modern celebrity in certain areas is due to fickle fate and social dynamics, popular attribution and cults of personality and so forth. I'm not saying there isnt real talent in there, but why some attain recognition and others not is often lost on me.