Some of the books I have been reading in the last few months include War and Peace, The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, Stephen King's Finders Keepers, Joanna Trollope's Marrying the Mistress and The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott. It started me wondering about how authors emerge from the pack, as it were, and become recognised as great writers. What is the procedure and what are the criteria?
Is it the passage of time or were the likes of Charles Dickens and Marcel Proust immediately singled out from their contemporaries? What are the contributions made by literary agents, publishers, critics and the public? I ask these questions because I would dearly love to know the answer. My opinion carries little weight, if only because I have, to my shame, read so little over the years, but I can't help wondering, from the short list above, whether for example Stephen King and Paul Scott will come to be considered two of our very great writers.
I think everything has become more complicated in the last 50 years or so because more and more books are being published. It stands to reason, therefore, that a greater number than before are of high quality. I write subject to correction, of course, but I would guess that the great writers who "emerged" in the first half of the 20th century - Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Waugh, Orwell, etc. - did so from a relatively small "pack". Am I right about this?
On re-reading the above, I immediately see that a subject of this kind either deserves frivolous treatment or something far more considered than I am able to deliver.
Nevertheless, I think that my central question (concerning how the novelist detaches himself or herself from the pack) is an interesting one. The last word to some degree rests with the reader but the first and most important word must surely belong to the critics. The former rank Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard in third position in Modern Library's list of 100 Best Novels, while the "Board" goes for Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...
I should really go back and study Frank Kermode's Romantic Image and Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction.
Is it the passage of time or were the likes of Charles Dickens and Marcel Proust immediately singled out from their contemporaries? What are the contributions made by literary agents, publishers, critics and the public? I ask these questions because I would dearly love to know the answer. My opinion carries little weight, if only because I have, to my shame, read so little over the years, but I can't help wondering, from the short list above, whether for example Stephen King and Paul Scott will come to be considered two of our very great writers.
I think everything has become more complicated in the last 50 years or so because more and more books are being published. It stands to reason, therefore, that a greater number than before are of high quality. I write subject to correction, of course, but I would guess that the great writers who "emerged" in the first half of the 20th century - Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Waugh, Orwell, etc. - did so from a relatively small "pack". Am I right about this?
On re-reading the above, I immediately see that a subject of this kind either deserves frivolous treatment or something far more considered than I am able to deliver.
Nevertheless, I think that my central question (concerning how the novelist detaches himself or herself from the pack) is an interesting one. The last word to some degree rests with the reader but the first and most important word must surely belong to the critics. The former rank Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard in third position in Modern Library's list of 100 Best Novels, while the "Board" goes for Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...
I should really go back and study Frank Kermode's Romantic Image and Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction.
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