(1) A hundred bucks says this is the most interesting post I read this month. Ten bucks says this year.
(2) If you don't know who Robert Caro is, listen to his interview with Conan O'Brien on the podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend.
(3) If you like Raymond Chandler, read Dashiell Hammet!
(4) I am very depressed about how few people enjoyed some of my favorite authors, because that means you can be a certified genius and still not get through to people.
(5) I am very heartened about how few people enjoyed some of my favorite authors, because that means *I* can be a certified genius despite not getting through to people.
A few months ago (in comments or Notes or somewhere) I mentioned that some authors receive prestige from prizes and some prizes receive prestige from authors. If the Nobels want to maintain their legitimacy, they should absolutely give Robert Caro the award. I'm reading his first book on Lyndon Johnson right now. The feeling is just...how could a single human being accomplish this?!
I came here to say that Chandler and Hammett feel totally different to me! I'm one of the Chandler-but-not-Hammetts. Out of the "hardboiled style" authors I've read, which I think is Spillane, Hammett, Richard S. Prather, and Jim Thompson, my favorites are the latter two. Chandler is like the Ray Bradbury of noir: lush, emotional, quite vulnerable. Very different vibe imho. I know most people feel differently! But I take this poll as evidence that, at least, there's a subset of readers who distinguish them sharply.
I also find them very different. Hammett’s is more consistently violent and hardcore——Red Harvest comes to mind. Hammett if I remember right was a Pinkerton and witnessed a lot of violence. Chandler, more urbane and nuanced, more of the classic detective. He would be my desert island author if I could only have one.
Red Harvest is my favorite! That said, it's the first book I ever read by him, so I'm definitely biased by the shock to the system I had when reading it. And all these comments have me jonesing to read more Chandler.
Hammett had great stories, Chandler also wrote great stories but had richer characters and was a better prose stylist. Film adaptations of either can be great, but I would rather sit down with a paper copy of Chandler any day. I had never thought of the vulnerability you mention, but yes, that too.
Agree with this. Hammett wrote good stories, but Chandler had that and a great deal more. Reading Hammett after reading Chandler can be a real letdown.
Hammet was a modernist with existentialist overtones, Chandler wrote lusher romantic prose with moralistic heroes. I personally Hammet’s dogged depressed detectives.
Your point is well-made. Incidentally, I just read "The Killer Inside Me" for the first time: what an absolutely bonkers book. I've never heard of Richard S. Prather--I'll have to check him out!
I remember a question about authors left out of the survey whom respondents felt deserved inclusion — was there anything interesting in those responses? Like, some author you assumed was obscure yet showed up in a significant number of responses? Or was it just a grab bag of names, with each respondent submitting names that few or no other respondents submitted?
I'm curious what ranking you'd get if you were to sort by (% "Like their work")/(% "Like their work" + % "Read their work").
Unlike the raw "Like their work" number, this would disentangle obscurity from enjoyment. Authors like Helen DeWitt would rise to the top because almost all respondents who had actually read them report enjoying the experience. Lewis and Nabokov would no longer be right next to one another because -- although their "% Like" numbers are identical -- only about half of respondents who read Lewis also like Lewis, whereas for Nabokov it's more like 75%.
(To get at the other side of the coin -- pure readership volume, disentangled from enjoyment -- one could make a separate ranking sorted by (% "Like their work" + % "Read their work").)
---
Re: the Richardson Prize, have all the finalists been decided upon? I submitted a novel and I can't tell whether or not I've been eliminated. I've received a few emails from the official gmail account since the time of my submission, which seems to indicate that I successfully "made it into the system," but I didn't receive anything saying that my book had been selected as a finalist *or* that it'd been eliminated in favor of some other candidate. (ETA: the issue has been resolved.)
I mean people self-select into reading an author as well. I haven't read George Eliot or Edith Wharton but I could guess that I'd prefer Eliot I think, based on what I know or what my friends have said who've read one or both authors.
So one element is how "predictable" the author is. Like I haven't read Infinite Jest or War and Peace but I have a lot of context already on what I'd be getting into with either novel; for books like that, I'd expect higher scores for (% "Like their work")/(% "Like their work" + % "Read their work"). The opposite kind of book would be something like Romeo and Juliet or To Kill a Mockingbird which is commonly assigned in schools.
It would be interesting to see them ranked this way. For example, only 30% liked Ted Chiang, but based on the graph, it looks like around 75% of those who read him liked his work.
All of the Samuel Richardson Prize finalists have been announced at this point.
I considered this, but I am not necessarily sure it’s a more meaningful way of measuring reputation. Authors that have a high reputation also have more people who attempt their work. Authors with a high reputation are also more likely to be taught in school.
My feeling is that if a writer is not well known or not often attempted, then that is in itself a form of judgement.
I also want to see them this way. I also wish there had been a "read and strongly disliked" option. I've read and liked most authors on this list, read and felt neutral about another good chunk (or lost their impression on my mind to time). But there are only maybe a dozen writers I LOVE as much as I HATE Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Franzen and Nabokov.
If I let people downvote authors, I think it would make the results worse. Any writer who is popular is also going to have haters. If a long-dead writer like Nabokov has strong haters, it should be a positive signal—it means their reputation is robust—rather than a negative one.
That could be interesting... but, sometimes surveys like this work better with fewer options. Adding more dimensions has the potential to just make the data messier.
Assuming I gave the same results as just know, the only authors to whom I react "Who?" are Percival Everett, Denis Johnson, Ottessa Moshfegh, Helen DeWitt, Jonathan Lethem, Rachel Kushner, Brandon Taylor, Djuna Barnes, Hanya Yanagihara, Garth Greenwell, and Alice Adams.
Claude says the median year these authors published their debut work was 2000, and of their "most notable work" it's literally 2013. So they're extremely new.
Yes, but...it's reasonable to imagine that readers might be more familiar with new authors rather than old authors. What we learn from this survey is that there is a subset of readers who know lots of classic authors but pay very little attention to contemporary writers. It's just as possible there could be a different group of readers who's the opposite--but that different group probably doesn't subscribe to Woman of Letters.
As to why Toni Morrison was not assigned reading for me in college, I think the answer is pretty simple: Beloved was published in 1987. I graduated from college in 1981. So there is probably a bit of a skew there. (That doesn't explain Melville though! In my case, "Bartleby the Scrivener" was assigned reading in High School, but not Moby Dick. (And certainly not the Actual Great American Novel, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade!))
That’s a good point! Looking at the data it seems like 20 percent of respondents under 50 were assigned her, but only 3 percent of respondents over 50. Even amongst the under 50 respondents tho, only Wharton and Melville were assigned less often.
Taking this survey drove home to me how steeped in modernism I am, and how even though I do read a lot of contemporary fiction, I tend to gravitate away from the more popular names.
Also, I think Hawthorne is great and that people who didn’t like him in high school should give him another shot. It may just not be well suited to the age group. (Though it was for me at the time.)
So interesting! As an older English major with a master's, I marked only one author "Who?" Now she is at the top of my TBR list. I do have to wonder about the person literate enough to encounter and answer this poll but not know who Shakespeare was. I'd be tempted to contact them and ask if they're okay...
I decided to look them up. They were a man, between 35 and 50 who didn't have a college degree. They have highly idiosyncratic tastes. They liked plenty of authors! But there were also lots of canonical authors they hadn't heard of:
I think knowledge of contemporary authors also tends to be more geographically limited. I took the survey and I am from the UK (though living in France) and I have heard of (even if I haven't read that much of) all the American authors on your list who are set-text "classics" in the US but not really in the UK (like Melville or Faulkner) but I had not even heard of most of the contemporary US examples. (Whereas I have certainly heard of, if not read, all the high profile UK/Irish equivalents.) I appreciate most of your respondents were from the US, but this is another possible contributory factor.
You are right! Non-American respondents had significantly less familiarity with contemporary US writers (and vice-versa, American writers were less familiar with contemporary UK writers). The effect is about half the size of the English-major gap, but quite real.
This would've biased the data more if I had included more contemporary UK writers in the survey (if I had, it would've made contemporary American writers look more popular than their British contemporaries).
I think the biggest effect is that some contemporary American writers are more popular in the UK than others are: Ted Chiang, for instance, seems to have much higher name-recognition amongst non-Americans than Roxane Gay does. His name-recognition amongst US respondents was lower than hers, but with the non-American respondents added in, they end up being on the same level.
As always, I like your essays. This one was particularly interesting. I think I'd heard of all but 2 of your 100 authors, and read at least something by 90+ of them.
Next time, try Claude for your charts and data analysis, seems to be the consensus out here.
Oh, you bet. My only personal use of AI is to find refs via Google's. Which is pretty good, and free. For my Wikipedia stuff etc.
Incidentally, you might like Alastair Reynold's latest novel, "Halcyon Years". VERY twisty tale of Yuri Gagarin reincarnated as a PI on a troubled generation-ship. Slow start, but he's rolling now, 2/3 in. Paul di Filippo has a good review up at Locus:
Wait wait wait. Shakespeare, Woolf, Eliot, and Nabokov are the most popular and well liked? These are not easy to read! What the heck to make of that? I mean, wowsa!! My mind is blown.
So many thoughts!
(1) A hundred bucks says this is the most interesting post I read this month. Ten bucks says this year.
(2) If you don't know who Robert Caro is, listen to his interview with Conan O'Brien on the podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend.
(3) If you like Raymond Chandler, read Dashiell Hammet!
(4) I am very depressed about how few people enjoyed some of my favorite authors, because that means you can be a certified genius and still not get through to people.
(5) I am very heartened about how few people enjoyed some of my favorite authors, because that means *I* can be a certified genius despite not getting through to people.
Robert Caro is the best! I think he is the greatest living American writer. Time is running out on awarding him a Nobel!
A few months ago (in comments or Notes or somewhere) I mentioned that some authors receive prestige from prizes and some prizes receive prestige from authors. If the Nobels want to maintain their legitimacy, they should absolutely give Robert Caro the award. I'm reading his first book on Lyndon Johnson right now. The feeling is just...how could a single human being accomplish this?!
I came here to say that Chandler and Hammett feel totally different to me! I'm one of the Chandler-but-not-Hammetts. Out of the "hardboiled style" authors I've read, which I think is Spillane, Hammett, Richard S. Prather, and Jim Thompson, my favorites are the latter two. Chandler is like the Ray Bradbury of noir: lush, emotional, quite vulnerable. Very different vibe imho. I know most people feel differently! But I take this poll as evidence that, at least, there's a subset of readers who distinguish them sharply.
I also find them very different. Hammett’s is more consistently violent and hardcore——Red Harvest comes to mind. Hammett if I remember right was a Pinkerton and witnessed a lot of violence. Chandler, more urbane and nuanced, more of the classic detective. He would be my desert island author if I could only have one.
Red Harvest is my favorite! That said, it's the first book I ever read by him, so I'm definitely biased by the shock to the system I had when reading it. And all these comments have me jonesing to read more Chandler.
It was my favorite also—so dark!
Hammett had great stories, Chandler also wrote great stories but had richer characters and was a better prose stylist. Film adaptations of either can be great, but I would rather sit down with a paper copy of Chandler any day. I had never thought of the vulnerability you mention, but yes, that too.
Agree with this. Hammett wrote good stories, but Chandler had that and a great deal more. Reading Hammett after reading Chandler can be a real letdown.
Hammet was a modernist with existentialist overtones, Chandler wrote lusher romantic prose with moralistic heroes. I personally Hammet’s dogged depressed detectives.
And how about James Ellroy?
Your point is well-made. Incidentally, I just read "The Killer Inside Me" for the first time: what an absolutely bonkers book. I've never heard of Richard S. Prather--I'll have to check him out!
In fairness I should say I read Prather >20 years ago now /o\ I got super into him but have not revisited. He's VERY pulpy.
I too have to check him out.
I remember a question about authors left out of the survey whom respondents felt deserved inclusion — was there anything interesting in those responses? Like, some author you assumed was obscure yet showed up in a significant number of responses? Or was it just a grab bag of names, with each respondent submitting names that few or no other respondents submitted?
Yes! I have to feed that into ChatGPT and figure out a way to analyze this =]
seconding this question!
Also interested to know this.
Yes! I have to feed that into ChatGPT and figure out a way to analyze this =]
I'm curious what ranking you'd get if you were to sort by (% "Like their work")/(% "Like their work" + % "Read their work").
Unlike the raw "Like their work" number, this would disentangle obscurity from enjoyment. Authors like Helen DeWitt would rise to the top because almost all respondents who had actually read them report enjoying the experience. Lewis and Nabokov would no longer be right next to one another because -- although their "% Like" numbers are identical -- only about half of respondents who read Lewis also like Lewis, whereas for Nabokov it's more like 75%.
(To get at the other side of the coin -- pure readership volume, disentangled from enjoyment -- one could make a separate ranking sorted by (% "Like their work" + % "Read their work").)
---
Re: the Richardson Prize, have all the finalists been decided upon? I submitted a novel and I can't tell whether or not I've been eliminated. I've received a few emails from the official gmail account since the time of my submission, which seems to indicate that I successfully "made it into the system," but I didn't receive anything saying that my book had been selected as a finalist *or* that it'd been eliminated in favor of some other candidate. (ETA: the issue has been resolved.)
Hi! Sorry about this, let me check to see what is going on with your submission.
I mean people self-select into reading an author as well. I haven't read George Eliot or Edith Wharton but I could guess that I'd prefer Eliot I think, based on what I know or what my friends have said who've read one or both authors.
So one element is how "predictable" the author is. Like I haven't read Infinite Jest or War and Peace but I have a lot of context already on what I'd be getting into with either novel; for books like that, I'd expect higher scores for (% "Like their work")/(% "Like their work" + % "Read their work"). The opposite kind of book would be something like Romeo and Juliet or To Kill a Mockingbird which is commonly assigned in schools.
It would be interesting to see them ranked this way. For example, only 30% liked Ted Chiang, but based on the graph, it looks like around 75% of those who read him liked his work.
All of the Samuel Richardson Prize finalists have been announced at this point.
I considered this, but I am not necessarily sure it’s a more meaningful way of measuring reputation. Authors that have a high reputation also have more people who attempt their work. Authors with a high reputation are also more likely to be taught in school.
My feeling is that if a writer is not well known or not often attempted, then that is in itself a form of judgement.
That's fair! Also a good reminder that this is a survey about their reputation, not necessarily their quality.
I also want to see them this way. I also wish there had been a "read and strongly disliked" option. I've read and liked most authors on this list, read and felt neutral about another good chunk (or lost their impression on my mind to time). But there are only maybe a dozen writers I LOVE as much as I HATE Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Franzen and Nabokov.
If I let people downvote authors, I think it would make the results worse. Any writer who is popular is also going to have haters. If a long-dead writer like Nabokov has strong haters, it should be a positive signal—it means their reputation is robust—rather than a negative one.
That could be interesting... but, sometimes surveys like this work better with fewer options. Adding more dimensions has the potential to just make the data messier.
- "the exact same people who knew about James Joyce, C.S. Lewis, and W.B. Yeats often had no idea who Jonathan Lethem was." That describes me.
The subject speaks ;)
I'm also one of these people.
Assuming I gave the same results as just know, the only authors to whom I react "Who?" are Percival Everett, Denis Johnson, Ottessa Moshfegh, Helen DeWitt, Jonathan Lethem, Rachel Kushner, Brandon Taylor, Djuna Barnes, Hanya Yanagihara, Garth Greenwell, and Alice Adams.
Claude says the median year these authors published their debut work was 2000, and of their "most notable work" it's literally 2013. So they're extremely new.
Yes, but...it's reasonable to imagine that readers might be more familiar with new authors rather than old authors. What we learn from this survey is that there is a subset of readers who know lots of classic authors but pay very little attention to contemporary writers. It's just as possible there could be a different group of readers who's the opposite--but that different group probably doesn't subscribe to Woman of Letters.
As to why Toni Morrison was not assigned reading for me in college, I think the answer is pretty simple: Beloved was published in 1987. I graduated from college in 1981. So there is probably a bit of a skew there. (That doesn't explain Melville though! In my case, "Bartleby the Scrivener" was assigned reading in High School, but not Moby Dick. (And certainly not the Actual Great American Novel, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade!))
That’s a good point! Looking at the data it seems like 20 percent of respondents under 50 were assigned her, but only 3 percent of respondents over 50. Even amongst the under 50 respondents tho, only Wharton and Melville were assigned less often.
Great work, Naomi, fascinating read. Poor Ted Chiang, I wish he was better known.
What're you talking about? He's doing great. Ted Chiang ranks very highly amongst the living authors in this poll.
Yeah I see what you mean.
Phew!
You beat Franzen!
There’s history.
Danielle Steel! My queen! How dare they!
The graph for her is the equivalent of Airplane Chickenpox for identifying these people that Naomi wrote about:
"There is very probably some cohort of readers who only care about contemporary fiction, but don’t care much for the classics"
Justice for Denis Johnson
I was surprised by his numbers!
Taking this survey drove home to me how steeped in modernism I am, and how even though I do read a lot of contemporary fiction, I tend to gravitate away from the more popular names.
Also, I think Hawthorne is great and that people who didn’t like him in high school should give him another shot. It may just not be well suited to the age group. (Though it was for me at the time.)
Agree on Hawthorne. I even enjoy the Scarlet Letter, though I wouldn't say it's his best.
So interesting! As an older English major with a master's, I marked only one author "Who?" Now she is at the top of my TBR list. I do have to wonder about the person literate enough to encounter and answer this poll but not know who Shakespeare was. I'd be tempted to contact them and ask if they're okay...
I decided to look them up. They were a man, between 35 and 50 who didn't have a college degree. They have highly idiosyncratic tastes. They liked plenty of authors! But there were also lots of canonical authors they hadn't heard of:
LIKED: Twain, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Orwell, Salinger, Conrad, O’Connor, Cheever, McCarthy, Chandler, Dick, Kushner, Ishiguro, Johnson
NEVER HEARD OF: Shakespeare, Hughes, Morrison, Spenser, Milton, Bunyan, Pope, Johnson, Sterne, Fielding, Defoe, Richardson, Coleridge, Trollope, Rhys, Barnes, Stevens, Robinson, Lahiri, Heinlein, Chiang, Smith, Moshfegh, Vuong, Greenwell, Taylor, Lethem, Whitehead, Yanagihara, Gay, Adams, Munro, Caro
Lizardman's Constant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
I think there’s a simpler explanation: the respondent was taking the piss.
Maybe I missed it, but I'm curious how many total people completed the survey
Sorry, I definitely should've put that in (have amended the post to include that info). It was about 1,200 people.
Thanks — pretty good sample!
I think knowledge of contemporary authors also tends to be more geographically limited. I took the survey and I am from the UK (though living in France) and I have heard of (even if I haven't read that much of) all the American authors on your list who are set-text "classics" in the US but not really in the UK (like Melville or Faulkner) but I had not even heard of most of the contemporary US examples. (Whereas I have certainly heard of, if not read, all the high profile UK/Irish equivalents.) I appreciate most of your respondents were from the US, but this is another possible contributory factor.
You are right! Non-American respondents had significantly less familiarity with contemporary US writers (and vice-versa, American writers were less familiar with contemporary UK writers). The effect is about half the size of the English-major gap, but quite real.
This would've biased the data more if I had included more contemporary UK writers in the survey (if I had, it would've made contemporary American writers look more popular than their British contemporaries).
I think the biggest effect is that some contemporary American writers are more popular in the UK than others are: Ted Chiang, for instance, seems to have much higher name-recognition amongst non-Americans than Roxane Gay does. His name-recognition amongst US respondents was lower than hers, but with the non-American respondents added in, they end up being on the same level.
Highly likely! I can probably check to see if non US respondents were less likely to know about US litfic writers and vice versa. I will report back.
As always, I like your essays. This one was particularly interesting. I think I'd heard of all but 2 of your 100 authors, and read at least something by 90+ of them.
Next time, try Claude for your charts and data analysis, seems to be the consensus out here.
Yes also apparently it won’t turn them into autonomous weapons :) I should try Claude—ChatGPT is just the one I used first so I feel more locked in.
Oh, you bet. My only personal use of AI is to find refs via Google's. Which is pretty good, and free. For my Wikipedia stuff etc.
Incidentally, you might like Alastair Reynold's latest novel, "Halcyon Years". VERY twisty tale of Yuri Gagarin reincarnated as a PI on a troubled generation-ship. Slow start, but he's rolling now, 2/3 in. Paul di Filippo has a good review up at Locus:
https://locusmag.com/review/halcyon-days-by-alastair-reynolds-review-by-paul-di-filippo/
Wait wait wait. Shakespeare, Woolf, Eliot, and Nabokov are the most popular and well liked? These are not easy to read! What the heck to make of that? I mean, wowsa!! My mind is blown.
1. When Hemingway wrote "The farm was big. The day was cool. The cow said 'moo'"... I really felt that.
2. A Little Life has sold like 2.5 million copies!
James Michener has sold 75 million copies.