What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn’t Last

On books that are remembered, rejected, and rediscovered
A writer friend of mine and I recently had a conversation about older books that led to a parlor game. One of us would read the titles of bestselling novels from a few decades ago and the other would try to guess the authors’ names. It was hard. Even with hints. A couple titles were easy— Life of Pi and Atonement—but most were not remembered. What was more surprising than the fact we couldn’t match names to (once) famous books was that many of the authors themselves were completely obscure. The conversation moved on, but we came away with a reminder: fame is fickle and fleeting. 

There were debates not long ago about whether or not recent popular novels like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games will be read “in 100 years.” I don’t really care much for either series, but it’s surprising how confident many are that what is popular now must necessarily be popular in the future. This is rarely the case. And 100 years is quite a long time. 1924 is an almost unrecognizable world. The differences in technology, global politics, and culture are hard to grasp. This is a time period when vaudeville was still one of the most popular artforms and feature films were barely even a thing. Those 100 years have seen the rise and fall of empires and culture has moved to entirely different technologies (video games, television, the internet, etc.) What will the world even look like in 100 years? 

I’ll save that speculation for a science fiction novel. But even limiting ourselves to literature, it’s simply the case that what endures has minimal correlation to either contemporaneous popularity or contemporaneous acclaim. Acclaim has a bit better track record—the names of early Pulitzer Prize winners are more familiar than the names of best-selling novels of 1920s for example—but neither is a guarantee of anything. The bestseller list of 1924 includes titles so obscure no one even made a perfunctory Wikipedia page for them.

Even the most popular books disappear. Take Zane Grey, who was the most popular author of the most popular genre (Westerns) in his day. Grey was one of the first millionaire authors ever and his novels were adapted into over 100 films. He was so popular and prolific that even though he died in 1939 his publisher had a stockpile of manuscripts they published yearly until 1963! Almost no one reads him today. 

I could go on and on with examples of how art fades. Perhaps the most interesting question is what makes something endure. What makes a work speak through time to multiple eras and contexts? There are certainly works from 100 years ago that are read today: A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, Billy Budd by Herman Melville, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, multiple books by Agatha Christie. I would like to think that quality helps determine what lasts, yet it is obviously more than that. Melville and Kafka, for example, both went through long periods of obscurity before being “rediscovered” decades after their deaths. They are likely to lapse into obscurity again in the future (and perhaps be rediscovered yet again and then forgotten again and so on). 

To offer a theory though, I think what lasts is almost always what has a dedicated following among one or more of the following: artists, geeks, academics, critics, and editors.
 
Artists play the most important role in what endures because artists are the ones making new art. Indirectly, they popularize styles and genres and make new fans seek out older influences. Artists tend to tout their influences and encourage their fans to explore them. In literature that takes the form of essays, introductions to reissues, and so forth. In music, it might be something like cover albums as in the way Nirvana’s Unpluggedintroduced a new generation to older bands and musicians. Academia is pretty obvious. The older books with the best sales are mostly ones that appear on syllabi. And geeks and critics are the ones who extensively explore a genre or category’s history and proselytize their favorites. Editors are the ones who actually chose the older books to republish and can champion obscure books back into the public eye.

Many of the books that endure are foundational texts in a style or genre. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel and archetypal mad scientist narrative. Bram Stoker’s Dracula as the template of vampire fiction. It helps that those books are very good, of course. But once again it’s impossible to know what will be foundational in a style or genre because that is dependent on what comes later.

Another way for a work to endure is through the randomness of popularity in another medium. Many books last simply because a film or TV adaptation is popular, although often the books are simply eclipsed. Many younger people probably don’t even realize that Jaws and The Godfather were originally popular novels. (Film/TV can also popularize things in amusingly random ways.

Lastly, I do have to acknowledge that we currently live in the “franchise era” in which the biggest works are not actually individual works by individual artists, but sprawling multimedia empires with video games, movies, TV shows, action figures, and even amusement parks attached. Perhaps this means that the rare super franchises—your James Bonds and Harry Potters and Star Wars’—can never die. I’m not entirely convinced. Even this shall likely pass. Time is fleeting. The brief candles flicker, even for sprawling multibillion corporate franchises. All we can do is write what we like and read what we love, and hope others like it too - either now or in the future.

In the meantime, happy reading.
​Joni