Results of the Literary Reputation Poll!

The survey revealed unexpected fissures between autodidacts and English majors

My nonfiction book, What’s So Great About The Great Books, is out May 19th. John Pistelli wrote a lovely review recently of the book. It’s so fun to see my book summarized by other readers I respect. Here he writes about how I came to the Great Books initially:

Starting after college, she put herself through a rigorous course of study, guided by Mortimer J. Adler’s midcentury Great Books curriculum, because she thought it was a necessary perquisite to her goal of becoming a writer; only later did she discover that the various elite populisms of the American literati actually rendered being a well-read writer somewhat eccentric, if not politically suspect.

I really enjoyed this review. It’s full of John’s characteristic asides—I’m coming up on two years as a regular reader of John’s weekly columns, and he creates such a little universe of literary preoccupations.

For instance, in this column he also discusses why Toni Morrisson fits so easily into the Great Books pantheon. And in a footnote, he writes about the Great Books’s origin as a democratizing institution, and the way familiarity with the Great Books may have been superseded by familiarity with literary theory. All things I’m familiar with from previous Weekly Readings, but it’s nice to see them revisited and elaborated upon—I’ve never been the subject of his attention in such a sustained way before.

Anyway, feel free to pre-order by my book on Amazon or on Bookshop or from your local bookstore. The book comes out May 19th.

I will have two events: one in NYC on May 27 and one in SF on May 30. More details on those will be forthcoming.

The Literary Reputation Poll

Several weeks ago, there was some debate on Substack Notes about which author was better: Faulkner or Hemingway.

As befits a Woman of Letters, I abstained from the grubby rough-and-tumble of public debate. Instead, I redoubled my efforts to solve this conundrum once and for all.

That’s because I possess an invaluable repository of hard data about the relative reputation of various literary figures. My Literary Reputation Poll—conducted at the end of last year—collected data from 1,200 respondents about one hundred authors. For each author, I gave the respondent four mutually exclusive options: “Who is that?”, “I’ve heard of them”, “I’ve read them”, “I have enjoyed their work”.

Now you might ask...what could this data possibly mean? This data doesn’t tell us whether someone thinks Hemingway or Faulkner is better. Well...no, it doesn’t. But it does tell us which authors are most-liked by our respondents. And since our respondents are the kind of people who tend to answer a “Literary Reputation Poll”, I think the answer actually has some meaning.

If you just want the big top-line takeaways from the poll, I’ve put them all into one handy graph that is hopefully self-explanatory. I figured the most important variable was how many people had actually enjoyed the work of each author, so I organized all 113 authors from top to bottom according to that stat. I also bolded the names of all the living authors.

Big-Picture Takeaways

• The dead authors on this survey had much more name recognition and popularity than the living authors.

• Bestsellers, even living or comparatively recent ones (Danielle Steel, John Grisham, James Michener, Tom Clancy) tended to be quite unpopular. Most survey respondents haven’t even read their work, much less enjoyed it. The major exceptions here were Stephen King and J.K. Rowling.

• Authors that were more popular with survey respondents also tended to have higher name-recognition. The blue bar shows the percentage of respondents who weren’t familiar with the author’s name at all. This bar was (to me) surprisingly high for many living authors: Garth Greenwell (56 percent were unfamiliar), Robert Caro (48 percent), Jonathan Lethem (46 percent), Marilynne Robinson (31 percent had no idea who she was).

• In contrast, there were 43 authors that had a “Who?” percentage that was under 5 percent—meaning more than 19 out of 20 respondents had heard of them. Sixteen authors had “Who?” percentages of under 1 percent. Four authors had complete name-recognition—nobody selected “Who?”. These were Poe, Tolkien, Twain, and C.S. Lewis. Two authors had only one “Who?”—Shakespeare and Austen.

• Keep in mind these are the same respondents. So the exact same people who knew about James Joyce, C.S. Lewis, and W.B. Yeats often had no idea who Jonathan Lethem was. This definitely suggests, as I pointed out over the summer, that there is a group of readers who are highly knowledgeable about classic books but don’t pay much attention to contemporary literature.

Individual authors

• In my mind, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett are in the same bucket. What Chandler is to noir, Hammett is to hard-boiled fiction. But Chandler had much better name recognition (only 17 percent hadn’t heard of him, versus 34 percent for Hammett) and had more popularity (32 percent liked Chandler, versus 23 percent for Hammett).

• Similarly, Lethem and Chabon were in the same bucket in my mind: they’re both Gen-X writers who mainstreamed genre elements into literary fiction. But Chabon has better name recognition (only 24 percent were unaware of him, versus 45 percent for Lethem) and more liked his work (26 percent versus 13 percent)

• Isaac Asimov had great name-recognition—only four percent hadn’t heard of him—and thirty percent of respondents liked his work, a surprisingly high showing for an author who’s never quite made it into the literary canon.

The Curriculum Question

In general, this data shows what you’d expect. The most-liked authors are canonical 19th and 20th-century novelists who wrote in a relatively accessible style: Austen, Orwell, Tolkien, Mary Shelley, Baldwin, Twain, Steinbeck, Dickens.

There are some outliers—writers who wrote in more self-consciously difficult or aestheticized styles. The biggest standout is Nabokov. I left it open to the respondent to define what it means to ‘like’ an author’s work. In some cases, I know that respondents felt if they liked a single poem or story, then they felt comfortable checking that box (I think that’s fine). Whereas with novelists, I imagine people didn’t check ‘like’ unless they had enjoyed a complete novel.¹ This means that novelists probably had to clear a higher bar to be ‘liked’ than did a story writer (John Cheever) or a poet (Emily Dickinson).

But Nabokov was a novelist. He wrote highly-aestheticized and not terribly accessible works. And yet his ‘like’ percentage is extremely high! Forty-eight percent.

In many cases, an author’s position is probably buoyed by their presence on school curriculums. For that reason I selected a list of 20 authors that I felt were often taught in school, and I asked respondents whether they’d ever been assigned the work. If respondents were assigned the book in both middle/high school and college, I asked them to just pick the former option. That’s why the college numbers might seem a bit low for Shakespeare and other authors that are heavily-assigned in high school.

Curricular Takeaways

• The bottom of the chart is the most interesting here. Toni Morrison and Herman Melville are not frequently assigned in high school or college, but they’re amongst the most-liked authors: Morrison is the 18th most-liked and Melville is the 20th most-liked.

• On the flip-side, Harper Lee, Hawthorne and Thoreau are heavily-assigned in school, but are only the 39th, 75th and 80th most-liked writers. This suggests how frequently you’re assigned in school is not determinative. It exposes lots of people to your work, but they don’t necessarily appreciate it.

Who exactly took this survey?

I asked a few demographic questions so I could understand the results a bit better. The survey-respondents skewed male (57 percent), American (72 percent), and college-educated. The education level was particularly notable. Even out of those who marked that they’d only completed ‘High School’ the vast majority were in the younger age bracket (18 to 35) and marked an answer for the college major question, which indicates to me that they were likely to be currently enrolled in an undergraduate program.

My understand is that most Americans don’t have a college degree, so this marks the strongest point of divergence between the survey respondents and the general population.

There weren’t major demographic differences between respondents who subscribed to Woman of Letters and those who didn’t. Since survey respondents were primarily recruited from this newsletter’s readers and from Substack notes, I am interpreting this to mean that Woman of Letters exists in an ecosystem that has a broad pool of people who are interested in the classics. And this pool tends to have certain characteristics (i.e. it is highly-educated and skews male). They don’t all subscribe to me, but there is a certain type of person who tends to subscribe. And that’s the same type of person who would be interested in a survey like this.

The English Major

The college major question led to a fascinating finding. I discovered that former English majors had much higher awareness of virtually all the writers in the survey, including contemporary writers who are (probably) not often taught in college. If you look here, you can see how English majors and non-humanities majors have vastly different levels of familiarity with some of the more obscure authors in this survey.²

In this graph the percentage indicates what percentage of respondents had any familiarity with the author at all. So only 32 percent of non-humanities majors had even heard of Garth Greenwell, but for those who’d majored in English in college, that number was 57 percent.

This seems quite remarkable to me! English majors were substantially more familiar even with relatively recent writers like Jonathan Lethem, Roxane Gay, Ottessa Moshfegh, Hanya Yanagihara, and others.

They also showed that awareness of many classic authors is much-weaker amongst non-humanities majors than amongst humanities majors. Samuel Richardson had only 42 percent name recognition amongst non-humanities majors, but 70 percent amongst English majors. For Edmund Spenser, the gap was 49 percent versus 80 percent. Henry Fielding the gap was 53 percent versus 81 percent.

There weren’t any authors for whom the gap went in the other direction: no authors that non-humanities majors were more likely to know about than English majors. Robert Caro and Robert Heinlein were outliers in this data, they were the only authors for whom overall familiarity was relatively low (54 percent for Caro and 76 percent for Heinlein), who also had a familiarity gap of under 10 percentage points—both English and non-humanities majors were equally likely to be familiar or unfamiliar with these authors.

In almost every other case where the familiarity gap was low, it was because both English majors and non-Humanities majors had close to 100 percent name-recognition of the author.

Keep in mind, this is a self-selected of survey-takers who are generally very familiar with classic authors—respondents had 95 percent name-recognition for Twain, Joyce, Wordsworth and 40 other authors. For these 43 authors, the familiarity gap between non-humanities and English majors was tiny. However, I do think this study shows that there is a cadre of classic authors, particularly from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, whom autodidacts are less likely to explore (or even hear about).

There are other demographic variables that revealed a similar ‘familiarity’ gap. Older people and people with doctorates were much more likely to recognize an author’s name—but that’s not surprising. I’d generally expect people who are older and better-educated to know more. Furthermore, this English major effect was quite powerful even within each age and education bracket. A master’s degree holder with an English major was more likely to recognize these names than a master’s degree holder without one.

I looked into this further. There are cohort differences between the English majors and non-humanities majors: English majors were slightly older, slightly more female, and much more likely to have a doctorate or masters, but these differences didn’t weren’t large enough to explain away most of the familiarity gap.

My personal explanation is that there’s two separate types of respondents to the survey:

1. Autodidacts who did not major in the humanities but became interested in the subject on their own.

2. Humanities-acculturated people who also largely read the classics on the own, but who at some point had some schooling in the humanities that exposed them to a more formally-organized literary culture.

In other words, there are subscribers who are in touch with a broader contemporary literary culture, through friends, readings, review pages, or through journals like The New York Review of Books and The Point, and there’s subscribers for whom Woman of Letters is perhaps one of their only connection-points to the contemporary literary-critical world.

This matches with what I noted last summer, when I was talking to a reader, Arjun, who complained that he didn’t really understand a lot of the literary drama (e.g. about the vanishing male novelist) in many of the Substack zines.

Who’s in and who’s out?

The whole point of this poll was to figure out who’s on top! But the problem with a poll is that if you get some weird, counterintuitive result, then the poll is probably wrong. Like…if the poll had said Shakespeare and Jane Austen weren’t popular, then it would be suspect.

Luckily, it showed no such thing. There are no surprises amongst the toppers of our poll. Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov—they’re amongst the most popular and well-liked authors in our poll.

Nor is this entirely a result of them being shoved down peoples’ throats in school. Hawthorne and Thoreau have been force-fed to many a child, and they still rank as some of the least-liked authors in our poll.

The poll did show some softness in various reputations. The 18th-century novelists (Richardson, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne) did not fare well. Only Defoe had a high name-recognition, but his ‘like’ percentage was low, at 15%. The others weren’t recognized by between 30 and 45 percent of respondents, and less than 10 percent claimed to enjoy their work. Maybe if I’d had more British respondents, these authors’ numbers would be better, but I suspect that their reputation has really slipped in the last hundred years.

The most interesting findings come from the middle! Almost every contemporary author was quite obscure (relative to the older authors). And there are huge variations amongst various 20th and 21st-century authors who I’d think would have relatively similar reputations (Lethem and Chabon, Hammett and Chandler, Hanya Yanagihara and Sally Rooney). When it comes to these more-contemporary writers, it’s easily possible to see who’s in and who’s out (at least amongst my respondents).

It is very possible, however, that these writers have another cohort of readers. There is very probably some cohort of readers who only care about contemporary fiction, but don’t care much for the classics. These readers would be unlikely to subscribe to Woman of Letters or to answer this poll.

However…I question whether these contemporary-focused readers really get to have an opinion when it comes to the broader assigning of literary reputation. If this kind of reputation is about anything, it’s about “Where do you stand in relation to the great authors of the past?” If your readers aren’t reading the great authors of the past, then they have no ability to make that judgement.

Of course one could easily debate whether this poll means anything at all. I did not ask readers to directly rate these writers. I figured that the most important measure of reputation is simply, “Do sophisticated readers consider these authors to be worthy of their time?” Under this measure, what matters most is just whether or not these readers have chosen to engage with an author’s work.

That choice, of whether to engage, relies a lot on the author’s ambient reputation. Personally, I tend to enjoy most books that I read, but I tend to only read books that can teach me something or advance my understanding in some way. If I read an author, it’s because I’ve been told that they’re doing something I’ll find noteworthy.

I think my methodology captures that ambient reputation pretty well. It measures the authors that my readers have found worthy of their time.

The Contemporary

Ever since starting my MFA in 2012, my assumption has been that my reader or my listener will be much better-steeped in contemporary fiction than in classic fiction. Thus, if I’m trying to build connections with people, my assumption has been that I ought to use examples from buzzy, contemporary books like A Little Life or Normal People.

But in my prior life, as a science fiction writer, it was quite different. In that world, you have a lot of fans who came to the genre at different times. And at least when I was younger, the common referents tended to be Golden Age authors—Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke—and then the New Wave cohort of award-winning writers—Delany, Russ, Tiptree, etc. Even newer writers like Michael Swanwick and Michael Resnick weren’t reliably in the memory banks of most sci-fi fans.

I think the readership for Woman of Letters has a similar sensibility. The thing we all know about is the classics—older writers. In contrast, these newer writers are only of interest to a subset of my readership.

This is something that I kinda knew—I definitely try to provide more context whenever I’m writing about a newer author—but I hadn’t realized the degree to which it was true. For instance, I hadn’t realized that when I published my A Little Life review, there was a sizeable subset of my audience (perhaps as much as a third) who’d never heard of this book before.

I have to think harder about the ways that I cover contemporary literature. Personally, I hold contemporary books and classic books to a different standard. I don’t pick up a contemporary book hoping that I’ll come across the next Edith Wharton. For me, the classic exists in a genre by itself. What’s great about a classic is that you can trust it—you know that this book is great, and you just need to perceive its greatness.

Contemporary books aren’t like that. They require an exercise of judgement that the classics don’t require. I’m not necessarily interested in exercising that judgement. I don’t know which contemporary books will last, and I honestly don’t care—I’ll let their fate be determined by the ages. Instead, when I read contemporary books, I am usually looking for something new. Something I haven’t seen before.

I don’t want to tell people “This is the next Great American Novel” or “This is the heir to Moby-Dick”, because I don’t know if that kind of judgement is believable or helpful. Instead, I want to be able to say that this book is worth engaging with, precisely because it is contemporary, because it is from the current moment, and for that reason it provides something the classics cannot.

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Methodology

Sorry for the delay in releasing the results of the poll. I originally had a plan to brush up on my R and make the charts myself, but I realized eventually that this was too ambitious. My undergraduate degree is in economics, and I worked for ten years in international development, so I know a little statistics, but it’s quite rusty.

Ultimately I realized the only way of putting out these charts would be to use ChatGPT. Even that effort was quite time-consuming, requiring multiple days of work. Without AI, I simply wouldn’t have been able to analyze and present a lot of this data. To preserve anonymity, I removed email info from my spreadsheet before uploading to ChatGPT.

I also had to make a number of choices about how to present the data. Hopefully these graphs are somewhat helpful. In a future round of the survey, I’d like to release the data publicly so people can make their own charts, but I think that I’d need to ask survey-takers permission first if I was going to do that.

This did give me some ideas about questions I’d like to ask in a future round of the survey. I think that I’d like to ask about World Literature (i.e. ask these same questions but about The Ramayana and The Tale of Genji, etc.) And I’d also like to have ask about an expanded range of 20th and 21st-century writers.

I also have questions about peoples’ reading habits. I’d love to know what other periodicals people read, besides Woman of Letters, and what format they use for reading. Also about their other media—whether they watch Twitch, browse TikTok, listen to podcasts, etc. But maybe that should be a separate survey.

But that’s all a matter for another day!

AWP

I will be at the Association of Writing Programs this week in Baltimore. There are three places you can see me. Probably the best place is the meetup on Thursday, but I am happy to say hi at my other appearances too.

• Thursday, March 5th (11 AM)

  • There will be a Woman of Letters meetup. Sign-up here to get an email (probably on Wednesday) with the exact location).

• Friday, March 6th (1:15 PM)

  • A YA Panel: Ink Under Siege: Writing for Queer & Trans Teens in the Era of Book Bans

  • Room 326, Level 300, Baltimore Convention Center

• Friday, March 6th (2:00 PM)

  • I will be signing copies of my novel, The Default World, at the Feminist Press booth in the Bookfair.

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P.S. Samuel Richardson Award judging continues apace! Out of our stack of ten finalists, Moo Cat has named his personal pick: Drive A, by Merritt Graves. He writes:

Most of the characters are doped up with brain enhancers and fancy degrees from elite schools, but our protagonist is just like us: amazed, weary, and wary. The hyper-meritocracy of Graves’ world is never boring.

Check out the review here, and Drive A here.

1. One problem with this kind of survey is that people might be mistaken about whether they’ve actually read the writer. I’m sure some percentage of respondents just consider themselves Nabokov people, but if I interrogated them, I’d find that they actually haven’t read any of his work. For the purposes of this poll, whose intent is to measure a vibe (an author’s reputation), this fuzziness doesn’t necessarily seem like something I need to correct for.

2. I also provided people the option of marking ‘Other humanities major’ for this question. Their ability to recognize various authors stood almost exactly halfway between that of the English majors and the non-humanities majors.