I think this makes a lot of great points--especially about the economic pressures leading potentially popular and quality novelists to write for TV--but I do wonder if the focus on the nebulous "literary" fiction is obscuring the elephant in the room: the quality of popular fiction across genres is declining, A bestselling list filled with James Patterson, Colleen Hoover, and Rebecca Yarros is also a huge chasm from the days of John Le Carre, Stephen King, and Anne Rice. Right? What's causing such a quality decline across genres? And we could say the same for film, where well-executed and original blockbusters have given way to box office lists of interchangeable superhero sequels, Disney reboots, and toy films.
I guess what I'm saying is the internet / smart phone / apps / endless free distractions thesis of popular culture decline can't be so easily dismissed.
More pedantically, my read of the PW list is that American literary fiction disappears basically by the 1980s. There are two non-Americans on the 1980s list, otherwise I guess Gore Vidal's Lincoln? Then the 90s you only have Toni Morrison's Paradise (her first book after Nobel win). If you want to count Cold Mountain as literary fiction for the 90s, then you probably have to add Alice Sebold to the 00s and Anthony Doerr to the 2010s. I think you also missed that Franzen appears again in 2010. So, there isn't really a noticeable change here post 70s. Brand name commercial authors--mostly in thrillers and romance--completely take over in the 1980s and it stays that way until today.
I’m tempted to say it’s because they don’t read my novels but self-pity is no substitute for analysis, although it’s often a starting point. My real belief is that the widespread study of literature in academia planted the seeds of its decline in a variety of ways, culturally and in the marketplace.
My first sentence isn’t clear—I’m hurrying. A beautifully written work that has no story isn’t a successful literary work and for a long time now they have been hailed as such.
I think the impact on the gatekeepers and readers is more significant. People believe for a novel to be serious it shouldn’t have a plot, the language should be a struggle to read easily, and it should refer to other literary works, blow up genres and so on. They are challenging to read in every way but emotionally, and unlikely to sell. So yes literary writers can avoid academic approaches to writing by writing for TV and movies but that doesn’t help the novel thrive as a dramatic form that engages the reader with their own lives in a serious way.
All this could be said more simply, and it’s not about ‘gatekeepers.’ You dislike the modernist novel. And the style of writing it embodies. You dislike the postmodern novel’s intertextuality. What remains then?
Consider this: people invest immense effort, money, and time to build their biceps, yet remain convinced that reading requires no exertion. If an author proves challenging in any way — they’re deemed a bad author. Could this signal an erosion of reading skills? Of foundational humanities literacy? Without these, Proust or Coetzee become inaccessible.
Another point. You mentioned the novel’s sales figures. This matters profoundly — and relates directly to neoliberal cultural politics. When sales become the benchmark, all else fades to background noise. As early as the 1980s, Baudrillard observed that meaning has no demand — it’s produced (not difficult!) but no one needs it. And only a slight nudge was needed — simpler, more accessible media: video games, cable TV, social networks — to undermine the practice of reading as leisure. If books lose their intrinsic value, we become like the merchant in Brecht’s The Measures Taken: ‘I don’t know what rice is. I only know its price.’
I tried one English class in college and bailed after one session. Never had the gumption to attack stories and writers and show how smart I am (maybe realized I'm not so smart...). But I loved reading everything. And I loved going to author readings when they came on campus.
I can’t go into detail at the moment because I’m traveling but the main issue for me has been the separation of a belief in story from elegance of language. And also a lack of awareness that’s there’s a distinction between plot and story that is crucial to understanding what once made literary fiction popular, apart from the obvious lack of competition.
This resonates with something in a recent memoir about V.S. Naipaul in Granta:
After reading part of the then-young writer’s first novel, Naipaul complains/explains:
“[T]here is no sense of the narrative. You need to give a line, a line.’ He rose very quickly and went around the room. He was looking for Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale. ‘I don’t want you to write like Maugham,’ he said, ‘but read him for narrative.’
“The ‘narrative line’, he explained, is something that ‘cuts through the fiction, small things attach themselves to it, but don’t worry about the small things’. He gave the example of Wuthering Heights: ‘I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.’ Great Expectations was another example. ‘There’s the Pip, Pirrip business,’ he said, referring to how Pip gets his name. ‘Then there’s the scene with the convict. It is an arresting beginning,’ he said, with yet greater urgency.”
I don’t quite get what he means by the “line” - but maybe it’s along the same, well, lines you have in mind.
Approximately ten years ago, I was in the office of a well-known editor who'd published one of the most talked-about, well-reviewed, and award-winning literary novels of that year. And I was shocked to learn that it has sold less than 10,000 copies. I cussed in disbelief. And the editor said. "Sherman, those are good numbers."
Sure, that may very well be. But... I... really don't think that's contextually any different than genre sales, given the context of comparing literary books to genre books. Kavalier and Clay averages out to 667 per week as a backlist book over two and a half decades is actually something I’d personally prefer to 5,000-10,000 in a given week.
Moreover, Jim Butcher — who but for his first book — posts a nearly identical number of units for the books of the Dresden Files and makes bestseller lists consistently. That includes vol. 2 which came out within the same time frame as Kavalier and Clay and sold an almost identical number of units in that 25-year span. Butcher did not have these equivalent sales numbers until later books came out (which K&C had), later books won Hugo nominations, television adaptations, etc.
And Butcher's one of the bestseller exemplars for urban fantasy — his agency DMLA makes sure folks know that. So if we're not comparing apples to apples, then what exactly are we doing here?
Butcher's new Cinder Spires novels are VERY good. He has elevated his game considerably. Butcher can rival Vonnegut or surpass him if he can keep it up.
One number I never tire of quoting is that, according to the British Publishers Association, in 2023 the *median* first-year sell through rate for literary fiction in the UK was just 241 copies.
I’m no insider but I do know a little about the Canadian publishing business. I think it is telling that, a couple of years ago, Ontario dropped the requirement for companies to print at least 500 copies of a book in order to qualify for the provincial tax credit that keeps many small publishers afloat. I take this to mean that book sales in general are so poor that shifting 500 copies is unrealistic for most titles.
The real problem is in the editing process. Great fiction is unique in voice and style but every book that is published nowadays is published by committee. Don’t imagine why one person totally committed to an artistic pursuit is no longer capable of creating good art. Imagine they have and now they have to get that art past the five to six people who need to love a book for it to even have a shot at being successful and that each of those people are going to inject themselves into the finished product. Literary fiction is a hive mind product now. You’re reading a meshing of several different psyches on the page. The result is just stale slop. We have an editing crisis first and foremost and even if we dealt with that you have an authenticity crisis among writers themselves. They just won’t tell the truth. They’re too afraid.
This! You are absolutely right. This is also why "the male problem" exists in literature. It's not that publishing is crawling with misandrists. It's not. It's that decision-by-committee amplifies the slight casual misandry (far less severe than the racism and sexism of 1950s publishing that went the other) to the point that it becomes a real barrier.
The collapse of trust in editing is a major issue, too. Authors don't know if their editors are suggesting changes for solid artistic reasons due to decades of experience... or because the publisher has non-literary interests such as cultural conformity or printing costs—e.g., the word-count cutting that has destroyed several genres in the past twenty years.
Statistically, at least 7 of the next 10 important literary figures will be self-publishers. Possibly eight or nine. If we don't find a way to reverse enshittification, though, how will we find them?
Good point. One editor is hugely useful, because he'll trim your worst idiosyncracies, and because you as author can discuss things with him and argue back. A committee of editors is a disaster, because they'll each want to change different things and it's harder to discuss items. Plus, the editors will be trying to impress each other-- especially the junior wanting to impress the senior.
I expect, too, it becomes the boss-editor and the servant-author. Hollywood does well, I hear, with multiple rewriters of scripts, but there, the director or producer is in charge and the "editors" are flunkies.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. Modernism had a similar effect and the authors who became anti-modernist (Larkin, Betjeman, Housman, etc etc) sold well by brining the common reader back into things. But it's not like the modernists weren't popular! I think that the rise of television has to be an equally significant factor.
Is it possible to understand sales of pre-War authors, say Joyce and Proust, in ways at all comparable to more modern numbers? I don't know how far back things like Publisher's Weekly numbers go.
I think the supply-side argument is the strongest. The current economy makes it absolutely impossible to live without substantial income. There are no outskirt neighborhoods with cheap old houses, cities no longer have marginal neighborhoods, and the average American can’t afford a home, healthcare and likely enough food.
The only rational choice for a smart person is to get into the market, either finance, tech or consulting.
It is the same reason actors are getting worse and why we no longer have the stereotypical Jewish academics and psychoanalysts. If you can escape the horror of the modern economy, you must.
Interestingly, there is a great literary fiction pipeline, but it is mostly in translation. Polish, Baltic, Turkish, etc., are producing interesting fiction (like Solenoid). Perhaps because in those places financialization hasn’t completed its devastation.
This seems incorrect to me. You can live rather cheaply in the US, but you generally can't live cheaply in any place with a strong concentration of highly educated people. There are a lot of places where you can buy a house for $200k (about 3 times average family income in the US), but they don't have any sort of literary culture. As for food, obesity is a major health problem, especially among the poor.
There do seem to be some exceptions. There is the "Pioneer Valley" around the cluster of colleges near Amherst, Mass. where there are a lot of faculty and living is cheap because there isn't other well-paying employment.
I was mostly referring to cultural concentrations - small university cities like Ann Arbor and large cultural cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc.
Is that true? I bet there are far more fellowships, literary teaching positions in junior colleges and colleges, trust fund babies, and grants than ever before. Someone should measure this. The financial ease of writers now might be the reason for lower quality.
Generally, around 1970 so many things changed about the US economy and its class structure that there is a site just for charts about it, https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
This piece does a good job showing that it's also apparent in the arts — the quality and popularity of literary fiction could apparently be another two of these charts that break right around 1971.
The "thing" that these charts are referring to is the Nixon Shock and the end of Bretton Woods. Financialization and the ensuing inequality and asset inflation since 1971 is the cause of so many social ills
Perhaps. It’s a strong hypothesis, but there are live debates about the causal history of the Nixon shock and its alleged effects, many of which may have been more properly effects of a cause of the Nixon shock rather than effects of the Nixon shock itself. I haven’t resolved my own opinions on the matter.
Isn’t the main most important point here that postmodernism killed fiction publishing? Woke is too narrow a category, fhe broader social force that dramatically shifted every part of society was post-modernism, ie the rejection of meaning and the belief that everything is subjective. Writers stopped writing great books because they *didn’t believe there were deeper truths about reality* so they stopped writing the masterpieces that historically have been driven by an engagement on some level with suffering, good, evil, and love. So to write Great Books that have universal appeal instead of niche appeal, we have to actively reject postmodernism and embrace a world that has meaning (which the average person is dying for by the way, hence the statistics showing a growing shift back to religion)
Postmodernism is a horror that has ruined much, but I don't see why social angst, enui, and lack of external anchors cannot be themes in literary fiction. My own take is that literary fiction is hard to do. There were always relatively few who had the talent AND the time without doing something else to keep food on the table.
if they really believed everything was subjective they wouldn't mandate experimental vaccines. What they mean is that sexuality is subjective, that there are no sex-experts, only lgbt equality and abortion rights.
Is there a connection here to the decline in broadly popular new public architecture and classical music? Those are also fields where contemporary creators have been plausibly accused of optimizing for in-group critical acclaim instead of lasting cultural esteem.
"Classical music" is a just an audio museum for the most part. If Beethoven and Mozart were alive today they would be writing film scores and blockbuster multimedia pieces for the Sphere in Los Vegas.
I'm initially tempted to say the problem is older with art music and architecture, but I'm simultaneously quite tempted to compare the existence of, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copland long into the twentieth century with the absolute absence of any living (let alone young!) figures in their fields of anything like the same size of audience. In opera, where there are so few works that ever get performed that you can really count them out by year, the last work of universal cultural impact was either Turandot (1927, contains *Nessun Dorma*) or Porgy and Bess (1935, contains *Summertime*), the last more or less uniformly acknowledged great writer by afficionados is Benjamin Britten, who finished in the '60s, and the youngest composers to have made any kind of showing in trying to enter the repertoire are Silent Phil Glass and very old Boomer John Adams; one could think of these Minimalists as the operatic analogue of Pynchon in literature. For the Gen X authors...I guess Thomas Adés might be an analogue. I am deeply involved in classical music and unusually interested in new stuff and I'm pretty sure I have never heard of any opera by any fellow Millennial.
What is literary fiction anyway? Because Demon Copperhead was on the NY Times Bestsellers list for over a year and if that book is not considered part of the genre then you might be splitting hairs here.
You know that list if heavily edited, right? It is not an actual top seller list. It is a list of the books they believe you should read that sell well. There is a massive difference. Many books sell hundreds of thousands of copies and never make that list. The Economist had an article about it.
Where? I just went back and searched the document, and the only reference I found simply stated that it existed, unless I am commenting on a completely different article, which I hope is not the case (it happened before though).
If it is not too much trouble, can you roughly direct me to where this is? I completely missed it.
"Percival Everett’s James is the most recent work of literary fiction to make the New York Times’s weekly bestseller list — it was the best-selling book in the last week of 2024"
I saw that, but how does it relate to the fact that the New York Times best seller list excludes books that sell more than any of their listings? I hate to bother you, but I am lost. The New York Times best seller list is contrived. It has no connection to reality. The numbers are for the books the New York Times staff believe you should read. I have made a real effort to avoid any book listed there. I do not trust the New York Times. I was a subscriber for twenty years, but I had to stop reading when they became a bias-filled rag. It is a shame. The Economist is the only major publication I still trust.
I found it interesting that OY uses the PW list, which relies heavily on BookScan according to their more transparent methodology, while NYT is very cagey about their methodology which relies more heavily on independent bookstores than on sales through Amazon or big box stores as far as we can tell (ie for the festival I run, we use an NYT reporting store as our primary bookseller and that seems to matter to publicists/authors). So I do think we have to talk about algorithms and Amazon and the availability of books in stores beyond big coastal cities and college towns when we talk about the differences between these lists.
Any discussion on the historical decline of literary fiction in America needs to include at least a mention of B. R. Myers' "A Reader's Manifesto" from 2001. Even if you dispute his particular critiques of the various authors and books within it, his general thesis is that literary fiction declined for many of the reasons you listed: That the literary world had become more insular and detached from the general readership, and in turn grew more pretentious and opaque. He's less interested in diagnosing the whys and more concerned with demonstrating the shift that occurred. He doesn't go so far as to name a particular decade when this started, but I bet that he would have named the 70s or 80s.
Another essay worth considering is "Dysfunctional Narratives, or 'Mistakes were Made'" by Charles Baxter. Baxter identified a growing trend in literary fiction to produce "pre-moralized" stories about passive, error-free protagonists, and storylines seemingly designed to avoid any interpretation beyond the author's. It sounds like another dreary complaint about woke lit, but he penned the essay in 1997. It's clear from it and his other essays that he's no reactionary. (In fact, Baxter taught in a Midwestern MFA program, and some of his examples come from his students.)
As with Myers, even if you don't fully buy Baxter's diagnosis, it's hard to argue that *something* shifted in American literary fiction away from full-bodied novels with faulty but sympathetic main characters toward books heavy on stylistic tics, "big ideas," sweeping generalizations, obscurantism, flattened emotions, and moralizing. The identitarianism of the last ten to fifteen years simply found a welcome home in this new framework.
As someone who is sort of recognized as a writer of contemporary literary fic/nonfic (like, I have won the Whiting, Granta Best of Young American novelists, and my name was a NYT crossword clue…) I wade into these waters very warily but also with curiosity. I am not so hubristic as to think I don’t suffer from plenty of the non-genius attributes described in this piece & in the comments section. I WILL say that I love Charles Baxter’s craft book on fiction (from which Dysfunctional Narratives comes), Burning Down the House, & the first time I read Dysfunctional Narratives in my MFA program (another ding, perhaps) I felt extremely called out. I remain curious about these conversations and will continue to observe.
I too was introduced to "Burning Down the House" during my time in an MFA program, although the essay that got more attention back then was "Against Epiphanies."
This piece refers to " a steady decline in consumer popularity [of literary fiction] beginning in the 1980s & 90s until almost complete collapse in the early 2000s." I worked as an editor during theseyears publishing a whole lot of literary fiction, and I did not experience it this way at all. The divergence in our points of view derive from the fact that this author takes amost no cognizance of the paperback market, which is where most literary fiction ends up after its short life in hardcover (or begins in the first place). In fact paperback is the natural home of literary fiction, for a variety of reasons. The use of the the NY Times hardcover bestseller list as a leading indicator distorts the real picture of which books actually find an audience over time and of what size. It is, in fact ,fairly useless.
I'll cite some instances that I had personal experience with. Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE sold 22,000 copies in hardcover in 1985 -- not bad, especially given his usual sales up to that point, but nowhere near bestseller numbers. But when we published it in Penguin paperback it quickly got up to six figures, and to date it has sold more than a million copies in all formats in the US. Willliam Kennedy's IRONWEED sold 15,000 copies in hardcover, low considering the phenomenal reviews it received. When it was awarded the Pulitzer, though, the paperback quickly went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies in its first year on sale. Hanya Yanagihara's A LITTLE LIFE sold a handsome number of copies in hardcover, maybe 60,000 copies, and may have been briefly on the betseller list, I forget. But in paperback it has become a phenomenon, selling more than a milllion copies.
There are hundreds of examples of books from this period that exceeded their initial sales in hardcover spectacularly in paperback and have gone on to have real impact in our literary culture and in the culture at large. If one knows this, the ultra-gloomy picture this piece paints lightens considerably. I could pick at a number of other distortions and clear mistakes in this exercise in declinism, but the way it ignores the reality of paperbacks in the publishing ecosystem is a really big one.
Two things struck me here, and I don’t think any piece of writing on this subject can be taken seriously without wrestling with them:
1) The internet. I personally read reams of text (often really high quality text!) online every day without needing to crack open a book.
2) The old man effect: every generation is always complaining that writing is dying and it’s not like the good old days. Surely you have to start from the assumption that this isn’t true, and if there is anything interesting to be found here, it is in the specifics of today’s changes, not in merely observing that the sky is falling.
For example, the category of “literary fiction” is a bit of a wrong ‘un from the start; one possibility is that this category is collapsing. Maybe exciting and vigorous things are emerging from the genres. I’ve loved some recent sci-fi; detective noir has turned itself inside out several times; fantasy has produced some stormers (Piranesi - I didn’t love it but everyone else did; Kuang’s Babel rocked my world); romance… uh, I guess I won’t comment as I don’t know anything about it!
Now go back 150 years prior to 1962. What do you find?
Now another 150. What do you find?
Now another.
Now another.
Now another.
Do that twenty times. Average it out by genre.
Still mostly Wouk and Salinger types? Or are they exemplars of 20th century outliers from the international, historical baseline?
Once more, with vigor, the quote from Pratchett in the 1995 interview with The Onion that Patrick Rothfuss unearthed for us:
"O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
"Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.
"O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
"P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.
"O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.
"P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
"Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
"(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself."
He doesn't reach an intelligible conclusion. I think the explanation is simple. The fault is with the politics and the impoverished tastes of the institutions and industry that foster fiction. It's never been an industry that attracted people who did it for the money. The people now in charge see the world in a binary, over-simplified way and want parables that hit you over the head with sentimentality, recurring woke themes, and are told in dumbed down language. They decide what's going to be published, reviewed, and they tell us what to believe is good.
To make matters worse, you've got this closed system of MFAs and writing departments. There's no money in it but it's a red badge to be writing as an avocation. Kafka wouldn't happen today.
I realize this last message is self serving. But I asked ChatGPT: Who are some great writers in the past who didn't write for a living, other than Kafka? Had day jobs.
Great question — and the answer is surprisingly rich. Many of the most enduring writers in history did not write for a living, especially before the 20th century. Some held day jobs out of necessity, some by temperament, and others because literature itself was never conceived as a sole profession.
Here’s a curated list — omitting Kafka, since you mentioned him — of great writers with day jobs, including some surprising ones:
⸻
1. T.S. Eliot – Banker and Publisher
• Worked at Lloyds Bank in London during the years he wrote The Waste Land.
• Later became an editor at Faber & Faber, where he published others (like W.H. Auden).
• He once said his job gave him discipline — and separation from the “bohemian” life.
⸻
2. Wallace Stevens – Insurance Executive
• Vice President at The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company.
• Lived a completely conventional corporate life — while writing some of the most imaginative American poetry of the 20th century.
• Famously declined an invitation to teach at Harvard so he wouldn’t have to give up his job and routine.
⸻
3. Fernando Pessoa – Clerk and Commercial Correspondent
• Worked as a translator and freelance commercial letter-writer for shipping companies in Lisbon.
• Created an entire universe of heteronyms — each with their own voice, biography, and style — in relative obscurity.
⸻
4. William Carlos Williams – Physician
• Practiced as a family doctor and pediatrician in New Jersey for decades.
• Wrote in spare hours, often on a typewriter between patient visits.
• His grounding in ordinary life and bodies shaped his American, anti-elitist poetic vision.
⸻
5. Anton Chekhov – Physician
• Practiced medicine while writing plays and short stories.
• Said:
“Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.”
• His medical eye shaped his humanism and psychological precision.
⸻
6. Georges Perec – Archivist and Researcher
• Worked as a scientific researcher in neurophysiology and later as a documentalist at a CNRS lab in Paris.
• Wrote Life: A User’s Manual and other Oulipian masterpieces while holding this day job.
⸻
7. Bohumil Hrabal – Railroad Worker, Paper Baler, and Clerk
• Held many manual labor jobs in Communist-era Czechoslovakia.
• His work, especially Closely Watched Trains and Too Loud a Solitude, is deeply shaped by these experiences.
⸻
8. J.L. Borges – Librarian and Director
• Worked as a librarian, then as the director of the National Library of Argentina.
• Also gave lectures, but literature wasn’t his full-time profession.
• Said that “he always imagined paradise as a kind of library.”
⸻
9. Robert Frost – Farmer and Teacher
• Tried to run a New Hampshire farm for years while writing poetry.
• Also worked as a teacher and lecturer before gaining fame in his 40s.
I strongly disagree. The internet has allowed book buyers to find more interesting books from different places than the preferences of the neighborhood bookstore.
Movies and music have declined due to piracy, not changing consumer preferences. If anything, when movies give audiences what they want they make money. The studios that are struggling are doing so because they do not value what their audience desires.
I think this makes a lot of great points--especially about the economic pressures leading potentially popular and quality novelists to write for TV--but I do wonder if the focus on the nebulous "literary" fiction is obscuring the elephant in the room: the quality of popular fiction across genres is declining, A bestselling list filled with James Patterson, Colleen Hoover, and Rebecca Yarros is also a huge chasm from the days of John Le Carre, Stephen King, and Anne Rice. Right? What's causing such a quality decline across genres? And we could say the same for film, where well-executed and original blockbusters have given way to box office lists of interchangeable superhero sequels, Disney reboots, and toy films.
I guess what I'm saying is the internet / smart phone / apps / endless free distractions thesis of popular culture decline can't be so easily dismissed.
More pedantically, my read of the PW list is that American literary fiction disappears basically by the 1980s. There are two non-Americans on the 1980s list, otherwise I guess Gore Vidal's Lincoln? Then the 90s you only have Toni Morrison's Paradise (her first book after Nobel win). If you want to count Cold Mountain as literary fiction for the 90s, then you probably have to add Alice Sebold to the 00s and Anthony Doerr to the 2010s. I think you also missed that Franzen appears again in 2010. So, there isn't really a noticeable change here post 70s. Brand name commercial authors--mostly in thrillers and romance--completely take over in the 1980s and it stays that way until today.
EXACTLY. People read differently. There is always change. Fan fiction is huge that seems to be what people are reading now.
I’m tempted to say it’s because they don’t read my novels but self-pity is no substitute for analysis, although it’s often a starting point. My real belief is that the widespread study of literature in academia planted the seeds of its decline in a variety of ways, culturally and in the marketplace.
My first sentence isn’t clear—I’m hurrying. A beautifully written work that has no story isn’t a successful literary work and for a long time now they have been hailed as such.
I agree with all of this but it ought to be possible for it to survive outside academic study. Lots of writers didn't study Eng Lit.
I think the impact on the gatekeepers and readers is more significant. People believe for a novel to be serious it shouldn’t have a plot, the language should be a struggle to read easily, and it should refer to other literary works, blow up genres and so on. They are challenging to read in every way but emotionally, and unlikely to sell. So yes literary writers can avoid academic approaches to writing by writing for TV and movies but that doesn’t help the novel thrive as a dramatic form that engages the reader with their own lives in a serious way.
I do agree about gatekeepers. There is a lot of bad taste in the establishment.
All this could be said more simply, and it’s not about ‘gatekeepers.’ You dislike the modernist novel. And the style of writing it embodies. You dislike the postmodern novel’s intertextuality. What remains then?
Consider this: people invest immense effort, money, and time to build their biceps, yet remain convinced that reading requires no exertion. If an author proves challenging in any way — they’re deemed a bad author. Could this signal an erosion of reading skills? Of foundational humanities literacy? Without these, Proust or Coetzee become inaccessible.
Another point. You mentioned the novel’s sales figures. This matters profoundly — and relates directly to neoliberal cultural politics. When sales become the benchmark, all else fades to background noise. As early as the 1980s, Baudrillard observed that meaning has no demand — it’s produced (not difficult!) but no one needs it. And only a slight nudge was needed — simpler, more accessible media: video games, cable TV, social networks — to undermine the practice of reading as leisure. If books lose their intrinsic value, we become like the merchant in Brecht’s The Measures Taken: ‘I don’t know what rice is. I only know its price.’
I tried one English class in college and bailed after one session. Never had the gumption to attack stories and writers and show how smart I am (maybe realized I'm not so smart...). But I loved reading everything. And I loved going to author readings when they came on campus.
I completely agree. I studied English lit, but I want nothing to do with academia.
I can’t go into detail at the moment because I’m traveling but the main issue for me has been the separation of a belief in story from elegance of language. And also a lack of awareness that’s there’s a distinction between plot and story that is crucial to understanding what once made literary fiction popular, apart from the obvious lack of competition.
Yes, yes, this! I completely agree.
Yes, please say more, very intriguing.
This resonates with something in a recent memoir about V.S. Naipaul in Granta:
After reading part of the then-young writer’s first novel, Naipaul complains/explains:
“[T]here is no sense of the narrative. You need to give a line, a line.’ He rose very quickly and went around the room. He was looking for Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale. ‘I don’t want you to write like Maugham,’ he said, ‘but read him for narrative.’
“The ‘narrative line’, he explained, is something that ‘cuts through the fiction, small things attach themselves to it, but don’t worry about the small things’. He gave the example of Wuthering Heights: ‘I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.’ Great Expectations was another example. ‘There’s the Pip, Pirrip business,’ he said, referring to how Pip gets his name. ‘Then there’s the scene with the convict. It is an arresting beginning,’ he said, with yet greater urgency.”
I don’t quite get what he means by the “line” - but maybe it’s along the same, well, lines you have in mind.
P.S. link to piece
https://granta.com/vs-naipaul-the-grief-and-the-glory/
can you say more?
Approximately ten years ago, I was in the office of a well-known editor who'd published one of the most talked-about, well-reviewed, and award-winning literary novels of that year. And I was shocked to learn that it has sold less than 10,000 copies. I cussed in disbelief. And the editor said. "Sherman, those are good numbers."
They are for people who think that's okay. It's not okay.
I remember reading this about Kavalier and Klay; it won all the awards and sold, like, 30,000 copies.
Actually, based on the Goodreads data, Kavalier and Clay has now sold about 800,000 copies. Sometimes it's simply a long-tail thing.
Yeah, but I think at the time he won, sales were still comparatively anemic compared to actual bestsellers.
Sure, that may very well be. But... I... really don't think that's contextually any different than genre sales, given the context of comparing literary books to genre books. Kavalier and Clay averages out to 667 per week as a backlist book over two and a half decades is actually something I’d personally prefer to 5,000-10,000 in a given week.
Moreover, Jim Butcher — who but for his first book — posts a nearly identical number of units for the books of the Dresden Files and makes bestseller lists consistently. That includes vol. 2 which came out within the same time frame as Kavalier and Clay and sold an almost identical number of units in that 25-year span. Butcher did not have these equivalent sales numbers until later books came out (which K&C had), later books won Hugo nominations, television adaptations, etc.
And Butcher's one of the bestseller exemplars for urban fantasy — his agency DMLA makes sure folks know that. So if we're not comparing apples to apples, then what exactly are we doing here?
Butcher's new Cinder Spires novels are VERY good. He has elevated his game considerably. Butcher can rival Vonnegut or surpass him if he can keep it up.
Yeah, I talked about this in another comment thread in this same piece:
https://open.substack.com/pub/oyyy/p/the-cultural-decline-of-literary?r=25qi5v&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=127861363
One number I never tire of quoting is that, according to the British Publishers Association, in 2023 the *median* first-year sell through rate for literary fiction in the UK was just 241 copies.
I’m no insider but I do know a little about the Canadian publishing business. I think it is telling that, a couple of years ago, Ontario dropped the requirement for companies to print at least 500 copies of a book in order to qualify for the provincial tax credit that keeps many small publishers afloat. I take this to mean that book sales in general are so poor that shifting 500 copies is unrealistic for most titles.
Luckily American publishers do not receive subsidies so they need not worry about it and can focus on selling books.
The real problem is in the editing process. Great fiction is unique in voice and style but every book that is published nowadays is published by committee. Don’t imagine why one person totally committed to an artistic pursuit is no longer capable of creating good art. Imagine they have and now they have to get that art past the five to six people who need to love a book for it to even have a shot at being successful and that each of those people are going to inject themselves into the finished product. Literary fiction is a hive mind product now. You’re reading a meshing of several different psyches on the page. The result is just stale slop. We have an editing crisis first and foremost and even if we dealt with that you have an authenticity crisis among writers themselves. They just won’t tell the truth. They’re too afraid.
This! You are absolutely right. This is also why "the male problem" exists in literature. It's not that publishing is crawling with misandrists. It's not. It's that decision-by-committee amplifies the slight casual misandry (far less severe than the racism and sexism of 1950s publishing that went the other) to the point that it becomes a real barrier.
I talk about this here: https://antipodes.substack.com/p/why-traditional-publishing-is-bad
The collapse of trust in editing is a major issue, too. Authors don't know if their editors are suggesting changes for solid artistic reasons due to decades of experience... or because the publisher has non-literary interests such as cultural conformity or printing costs—e.g., the word-count cutting that has destroyed several genres in the past twenty years.
Statistically, at least 7 of the next 10 important literary figures will be self-publishers. Possibly eight or nine. If we don't find a way to reverse enshittification, though, how will we find them?
Good point. One editor is hugely useful, because he'll trim your worst idiosyncracies, and because you as author can discuss things with him and argue back. A committee of editors is a disaster, because they'll each want to change different things and it's harder to discuss items. Plus, the editors will be trying to impress each other-- especially the junior wanting to impress the senior.
I expect, too, it becomes the boss-editor and the servant-author. Hollywood does well, I hear, with multiple rewriters of scripts, but there, the director or producer is in charge and the "editors" are flunkies.
Are you being serious? Sarcastic? I can’t tell. Do you sincerely think I was advocating for no editing ever?
Couldn't disagree more. Every book I've read that lacked an editor has been obviously, massively worse for it.
Just go read RoyalRoad if you think not having an editor is going to unleash genius.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. Modernism had a similar effect and the authors who became anti-modernist (Larkin, Betjeman, Housman, etc etc) sold well by brining the common reader back into things. But it's not like the modernists weren't popular! I think that the rise of television has to be an equally significant factor.
Is it possible to understand sales of pre-War authors, say Joyce and Proust, in ways at all comparable to more modern numbers? I don't know how far back things like Publisher's Weekly numbers go.
Joyce took a million quid from Beech and Weaver and Proust was privately wealthy. They were basically hobbyists.
I dont think we have one data set, no, but we do know that they became very popular.
I think the supply-side argument is the strongest. The current economy makes it absolutely impossible to live without substantial income. There are no outskirt neighborhoods with cheap old houses, cities no longer have marginal neighborhoods, and the average American can’t afford a home, healthcare and likely enough food.
The only rational choice for a smart person is to get into the market, either finance, tech or consulting.
It is the same reason actors are getting worse and why we no longer have the stereotypical Jewish academics and psychoanalysts. If you can escape the horror of the modern economy, you must.
Interestingly, there is a great literary fiction pipeline, but it is mostly in translation. Polish, Baltic, Turkish, etc., are producing interesting fiction (like Solenoid). Perhaps because in those places financialization hasn’t completed its devastation.
This seems incorrect to me. You can live rather cheaply in the US, but you generally can't live cheaply in any place with a strong concentration of highly educated people. There are a lot of places where you can buy a house for $200k (about 3 times average family income in the US), but they don't have any sort of literary culture. As for food, obesity is a major health problem, especially among the poor.
There do seem to be some exceptions. There is the "Pioneer Valley" around the cluster of colleges near Amherst, Mass. where there are a lot of faculty and living is cheap because there isn't other well-paying employment.
I was mostly referring to cultural concentrations - small university cities like Ann Arbor and large cultural cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc.
Very interesting about Amherst!
200k (and needs 80k in renovations). Anyway 200k is still going to amount to $2k per month, only cheap if you're making 6-figures
Is that true? I bet there are far more fellowships, literary teaching positions in junior colleges and colleges, trust fund babies, and grants than ever before. Someone should measure this. The financial ease of writers now might be the reason for lower quality.
Generally, around 1970 so many things changed about the US economy and its class structure that there is a site just for charts about it, https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
This piece does a good job showing that it's also apparent in the arts — the quality and popularity of literary fiction could apparently be another two of these charts that break right around 1971.
This!
The "thing" that these charts are referring to is the Nixon Shock and the end of Bretton Woods. Financialization and the ensuing inequality and asset inflation since 1971 is the cause of so many social ills
Perhaps. It’s a strong hypothesis, but there are live debates about the causal history of the Nixon shock and its alleged effects, many of which may have been more properly effects of a cause of the Nixon shock rather than effects of the Nixon shock itself. I haven’t resolved my own opinions on the matter.
Isn’t the main most important point here that postmodernism killed fiction publishing? Woke is too narrow a category, fhe broader social force that dramatically shifted every part of society was post-modernism, ie the rejection of meaning and the belief that everything is subjective. Writers stopped writing great books because they *didn’t believe there were deeper truths about reality* so they stopped writing the masterpieces that historically have been driven by an engagement on some level with suffering, good, evil, and love. So to write Great Books that have universal appeal instead of niche appeal, we have to actively reject postmodernism and embrace a world that has meaning (which the average person is dying for by the way, hence the statistics showing a growing shift back to religion)
Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis all wrote masterpieces (plus Borges, Marquez, Beckett, Lessing, Spark, Grass to name a few).
Postmodernism is a horror that has ruined much, but I don't see why social angst, enui, and lack of external anchors cannot be themes in literary fiction. My own take is that literary fiction is hard to do. There were always relatively few who had the talent AND the time without doing something else to keep food on the table.
if they really believed everything was subjective they wouldn't mandate experimental vaccines. What they mean is that sexuality is subjective, that there are no sex-experts, only lgbt equality and abortion rights.
Is there a connection here to the decline in broadly popular new public architecture and classical music? Those are also fields where contemporary creators have been plausibly accused of optimizing for in-group critical acclaim instead of lasting cultural esteem.
"Classical music" is a just an audio museum for the most part. If Beethoven and Mozart were alive today they would be writing film scores and blockbuster multimedia pieces for the Sphere in Los Vegas.
I'm initially tempted to say the problem is older with art music and architecture, but I'm simultaneously quite tempted to compare the existence of, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copland long into the twentieth century with the absolute absence of any living (let alone young!) figures in their fields of anything like the same size of audience. In opera, where there are so few works that ever get performed that you can really count them out by year, the last work of universal cultural impact was either Turandot (1927, contains *Nessun Dorma*) or Porgy and Bess (1935, contains *Summertime*), the last more or less uniformly acknowledged great writer by afficionados is Benjamin Britten, who finished in the '60s, and the youngest composers to have made any kind of showing in trying to enter the repertoire are Silent Phil Glass and very old Boomer John Adams; one could think of these Minimalists as the operatic analogue of Pynchon in literature. For the Gen X authors...I guess Thomas Adés might be an analogue. I am deeply involved in classical music and unusually interested in new stuff and I'm pretty sure I have never heard of any opera by any fellow Millennial.
Nico Muhly's _Two Boys_ is the one opera by a "well known to critics" Millennial that came to my mind. But your general point is well taken.
What is literary fiction anyway? Because Demon Copperhead was on the NY Times Bestsellers list for over a year and if that book is not considered part of the genre then you might be splitting hairs here.
Yes, my favorite authors fall in the middle: excellent story tellers and excellent writers, like Philip Kerr
You know that list if heavily edited, right? It is not an actual top seller list. It is a list of the books they believe you should read that sell well. There is a massive difference. Many books sell hundreds of thousands of copies and never make that list. The Economist had an article about it.
NYT bestseller list was specifically cited in the post
Where? I just went back and searched the document, and the only reference I found simply stated that it existed, unless I am commenting on a completely different article, which I hope is not the case (it happened before though).
If it is not too much trouble, can you roughly direct me to where this is? I completely missed it.
The quote is
"Percival Everett’s James is the most recent work of literary fiction to make the New York Times’s weekly bestseller list — it was the best-selling book in the last week of 2024"
I saw that, but how does it relate to the fact that the New York Times best seller list excludes books that sell more than any of their listings? I hate to bother you, but I am lost. The New York Times best seller list is contrived. It has no connection to reality. The numbers are for the books the New York Times staff believe you should read. I have made a real effort to avoid any book listed there. I do not trust the New York Times. I was a subscriber for twenty years, but I had to stop reading when they became a bias-filled rag. It is a shame. The Economist is the only major publication I still trust.
I found it interesting that OY uses the PW list, which relies heavily on BookScan according to their more transparent methodology, while NYT is very cagey about their methodology which relies more heavily on independent bookstores than on sales through Amazon or big box stores as far as we can tell (ie for the festival I run, we use an NYT reporting store as our primary bookseller and that seems to matter to publicists/authors). So I do think we have to talk about algorithms and Amazon and the availability of books in stores beyond big coastal cities and college towns when we talk about the differences between these lists.
Any discussion on the historical decline of literary fiction in America needs to include at least a mention of B. R. Myers' "A Reader's Manifesto" from 2001. Even if you dispute his particular critiques of the various authors and books within it, his general thesis is that literary fiction declined for many of the reasons you listed: That the literary world had become more insular and detached from the general readership, and in turn grew more pretentious and opaque. He's less interested in diagnosing the whys and more concerned with demonstrating the shift that occurred. He doesn't go so far as to name a particular decade when this started, but I bet that he would have named the 70s or 80s.
Another essay worth considering is "Dysfunctional Narratives, or 'Mistakes were Made'" by Charles Baxter. Baxter identified a growing trend in literary fiction to produce "pre-moralized" stories about passive, error-free protagonists, and storylines seemingly designed to avoid any interpretation beyond the author's. It sounds like another dreary complaint about woke lit, but he penned the essay in 1997. It's clear from it and his other essays that he's no reactionary. (In fact, Baxter taught in a Midwestern MFA program, and some of his examples come from his students.)
As with Myers, even if you don't fully buy Baxter's diagnosis, it's hard to argue that *something* shifted in American literary fiction away from full-bodied novels with faulty but sympathetic main characters toward books heavy on stylistic tics, "big ideas," sweeping generalizations, obscurantism, flattened emotions, and moralizing. The identitarianism of the last ten to fifteen years simply found a welcome home in this new framework.
As someone who is sort of recognized as a writer of contemporary literary fic/nonfic (like, I have won the Whiting, Granta Best of Young American novelists, and my name was a NYT crossword clue…) I wade into these waters very warily but also with curiosity. I am not so hubristic as to think I don’t suffer from plenty of the non-genius attributes described in this piece & in the comments section. I WILL say that I love Charles Baxter’s craft book on fiction (from which Dysfunctional Narratives comes), Burning Down the House, & the first time I read Dysfunctional Narratives in my MFA program (another ding, perhaps) I felt extremely called out. I remain curious about these conversations and will continue to observe.
I too was introduced to "Burning Down the House" during my time in an MFA program, although the essay that got more attention back then was "Against Epiphanies."
Thank you for this great comment. I love this.
This piece refers to " a steady decline in consumer popularity [of literary fiction] beginning in the 1980s & 90s until almost complete collapse in the early 2000s." I worked as an editor during theseyears publishing a whole lot of literary fiction, and I did not experience it this way at all. The divergence in our points of view derive from the fact that this author takes amost no cognizance of the paperback market, which is where most literary fiction ends up after its short life in hardcover (or begins in the first place). In fact paperback is the natural home of literary fiction, for a variety of reasons. The use of the the NY Times hardcover bestseller list as a leading indicator distorts the real picture of which books actually find an audience over time and of what size. It is, in fact ,fairly useless.
I'll cite some instances that I had personal experience with. Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE sold 22,000 copies in hardcover in 1985 -- not bad, especially given his usual sales up to that point, but nowhere near bestseller numbers. But when we published it in Penguin paperback it quickly got up to six figures, and to date it has sold more than a million copies in all formats in the US. Willliam Kennedy's IRONWEED sold 15,000 copies in hardcover, low considering the phenomenal reviews it received. When it was awarded the Pulitzer, though, the paperback quickly went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies in its first year on sale. Hanya Yanagihara's A LITTLE LIFE sold a handsome number of copies in hardcover, maybe 60,000 copies, and may have been briefly on the betseller list, I forget. But in paperback it has become a phenomenon, selling more than a milllion copies.
There are hundreds of examples of books from this period that exceeded their initial sales in hardcover spectacularly in paperback and have gone on to have real impact in our literary culture and in the culture at large. If one knows this, the ultra-gloomy picture this piece paints lightens considerably. I could pick at a number of other distortions and clear mistakes in this exercise in declinism, but the way it ignores the reality of paperbacks in the publishing ecosystem is a really big one.
Two things struck me here, and I don’t think any piece of writing on this subject can be taken seriously without wrestling with them:
1) The internet. I personally read reams of text (often really high quality text!) online every day without needing to crack open a book.
2) The old man effect: every generation is always complaining that writing is dying and it’s not like the good old days. Surely you have to start from the assumption that this isn’t true, and if there is anything interesting to be found here, it is in the specifics of today’s changes, not in merely observing that the sky is falling.
For example, the category of “literary fiction” is a bit of a wrong ‘un from the start; one possibility is that this category is collapsing. Maybe exciting and vigorous things are emerging from the genres. I’ve loved some recent sci-fi; detective noir has turned itself inside out several times; fantasy has produced some stormers (Piranesi - I didn’t love it but everyone else did; Kuang’s Babel rocked my world); romance… uh, I guess I won’t comment as I don’t know anything about it!
Now go back 150 years prior to 1962. What do you find?
Now another 150. What do you find?
Now another.
Now another.
Now another.
Do that twenty times. Average it out by genre.
Still mostly Wouk and Salinger types? Or are they exemplars of 20th century outliers from the international, historical baseline?
Once more, with vigor, the quote from Pratchett in the 1995 interview with The Onion that Patrick Rothfuss unearthed for us:
"O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
"Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.
"O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
"P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.
"O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.
"P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
"Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
"(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself."
This is great. Thanks for sharing the link to it.
My pleasure.
and the others like him.
He doesn't reach an intelligible conclusion. I think the explanation is simple. The fault is with the politics and the impoverished tastes of the institutions and industry that foster fiction. It's never been an industry that attracted people who did it for the money. The people now in charge see the world in a binary, over-simplified way and want parables that hit you over the head with sentimentality, recurring woke themes, and are told in dumbed down language. They decide what's going to be published, reviewed, and they tell us what to believe is good.
To make matters worse, you've got this closed system of MFAs and writing departments. There's no money in it but it's a red badge to be writing as an avocation. Kafka wouldn't happen today.
I realize this last message is self serving. But I asked ChatGPT: Who are some great writers in the past who didn't write for a living, other than Kafka? Had day jobs.
Great question — and the answer is surprisingly rich. Many of the most enduring writers in history did not write for a living, especially before the 20th century. Some held day jobs out of necessity, some by temperament, and others because literature itself was never conceived as a sole profession.
Here’s a curated list — omitting Kafka, since you mentioned him — of great writers with day jobs, including some surprising ones:
⸻
1. T.S. Eliot – Banker and Publisher
• Worked at Lloyds Bank in London during the years he wrote The Waste Land.
• Later became an editor at Faber & Faber, where he published others (like W.H. Auden).
• He once said his job gave him discipline — and separation from the “bohemian” life.
⸻
2. Wallace Stevens – Insurance Executive
• Vice President at The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company.
• Lived a completely conventional corporate life — while writing some of the most imaginative American poetry of the 20th century.
• Famously declined an invitation to teach at Harvard so he wouldn’t have to give up his job and routine.
⸻
3. Fernando Pessoa – Clerk and Commercial Correspondent
• Worked as a translator and freelance commercial letter-writer for shipping companies in Lisbon.
• Created an entire universe of heteronyms — each with their own voice, biography, and style — in relative obscurity.
⸻
4. William Carlos Williams – Physician
• Practiced as a family doctor and pediatrician in New Jersey for decades.
• Wrote in spare hours, often on a typewriter between patient visits.
• His grounding in ordinary life and bodies shaped his American, anti-elitist poetic vision.
⸻
5. Anton Chekhov – Physician
• Practiced medicine while writing plays and short stories.
• Said:
“Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.”
• His medical eye shaped his humanism and psychological precision.
⸻
6. Georges Perec – Archivist and Researcher
• Worked as a scientific researcher in neurophysiology and later as a documentalist at a CNRS lab in Paris.
• Wrote Life: A User’s Manual and other Oulipian masterpieces while holding this day job.
⸻
7. Bohumil Hrabal – Railroad Worker, Paper Baler, and Clerk
• Held many manual labor jobs in Communist-era Czechoslovakia.
• His work, especially Closely Watched Trains and Too Loud a Solitude, is deeply shaped by these experiences.
⸻
8. J.L. Borges – Librarian and Director
• Worked as a librarian, then as the director of the National Library of Argentina.
• Also gave lectures, but literature wasn’t his full-time profession.
• Said that “he always imagined paradise as a kind of library.”
⸻
9. Robert Frost – Farmer and Teacher
• Tried to run a New Hampshire farm for years while writing poetry.
• Also worked as a teacher and lecturer before gaining fame in his 40s.
I strongly disagree. The internet has allowed book buyers to find more interesting books from different places than the preferences of the neighborhood bookstore.
Movies and music have declined due to piracy, not changing consumer preferences. If anything, when movies give audiences what they want they make money. The studios that are struggling are doing so because they do not value what their audience desires.