Authors who's best work is also their most popular?
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Authors who's best work is also their most popular?
Authors who's best work is also their most popular?
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
whose*
On The Road is probably one of Kerouac's worst work.
This. And people even seem to take the wrong message away from OTR. It ain’t live laugh love and travel
then what is it genius
his best is dharma bums btw
It's about a gay Catholic man that is conflicted about how much his faith hates his guts, so he self-destructs. Alcoholic, died young, his daughter
was a prostitute. And it's supposed to make love the boring office life, but that's not the answer either.
Honestly frick Catholicism and frick every religion.
Mad
No he wrote much worse books tbh. On the Road is okay it’s just a historical piece now about a past zeitgeist of the Boomers.
Maybe it’s certainly the best of his that I have read but I’ve only dipped into the beats a little.
>Kerouac a boomer
behold, the zoomer conception of history
You are historically illiterate about the beats. The Road became popular among the young boomers when Kerouac was middle aged. Just because a writer is in a generation doesn’t mean that’s their principle audience.
His best book in my opinion was either Dharma Bums or Visions of Gerard but I haven’t read either Visions of Cody or Big Sur happy now?
>can't even name his best book when called out
moroneed homosexual
It’s Big Sur and Mexico City blues
Pynchon/GR
Big Sur is his best book, I still get a chill every now and then thinking about it. The rest are forgettable past the age of 20.
Generally agree that Dharma Bums is probably the best.
Controversial choice of mine would be Desolation Angels, which I think is actually much better than Big Sur while also covering Kerouac's slide into an antisocial, fame averse alcoholic.
Maggie Cassady is also one of his best but it's a different sort of book, and also one his most heartfelt. The Town and City is also OK but just a worse version of Maggie Cassady.
Subterraneans is another good shorter work in the vain of Dharma Bums.
Lonesome Traveller, Vanity of Duluouz, and Visions of Cody are OK but far too long, I would only recommend them to ultra-fans.
Dr Sax I thought was shit. It was one of his earliest novel ideas and he was really obsessed with for some reason. He was clearly going for something unique, but I don't think he sticks the landing. Purely writing for himself, and that's OK, but I did not find it enjoyable.
His diary entries are also good (the collection Windswept World) and I'd recommend them for aspiring authors whether they like Kerouac or not, because he writes about the writing process very honestly and a lot of his insights are pretty relatable and illuminating. They're also funny because you follow along as he talks about writing On the Road over the course of several years, very evidently dispelling the pure marketing myth that he actually wrote the whole thing in one manic session.
Haven't read Tristessa or Visions of Gerard yet.
Dharma Bums isn't that good. Everything besides the hikes and firewatch slogs. The spiritualism is grating.
>Authors whose best work is also their most popular?
Most of them, to be honest. And it's more true the longer ago the writer wrote. 'The best critic is Time', and all that.
The whole 'overlooked masterpiece' thing is just nonsense from people who want to appear too cool for school. The literary equivalent of "I'm into this little band that you've probably never heard of."
SOME OBVIOUS AUTHORS WHOSE MOST FAMOUS WORK IS ALSO OBVIOUSLY THEIR BEST:
Herman Melville — Moby Dick
George Eliot — Middlemarch
Charlotte Bronte — Jane Eyre
Lewis Carroll — Alice In Wonderland
etc etc
There are so many it's sort of pointless because you end up listing every author ever. A better question:
WHAT AUTHORS' BEST WORKS *AREN'T* THEIR MOST FAMOUS?
A bit more controversial, obviously, but here are a few suggestions:
Evelyn Waugh — Helena (not Brideshead Revisited or any of the famous ones. He himself thought it his best).
William Golding — The Inheritors / Free Fall (not Lord of the Flies, although that's pretty good).
D. H. Lawrence — Sons and Lovers / The Rainbow / Women in Love (not Lady Chatterley, which is just famous for the scandal).
Robert Graves — The best of his poetry, by far (not I, Claudius).
Joseph Conrad — Nostromo, probably. (Not Heart Of Darkness.)
Jane Austen — Mansfield Park or Emma, rather than Pride and Prejudice. They're just more mature.
Anthony Burgess — His non-fiction (criticism) is much better than his fiction. If you want a novel, Nothing Like The Sun. But of course A Clockwork Orange will always be his most famous book, because of the film. (Hollywood is surely the biggest reason for an author's minor work becoming his most famous; e.g. if you say "Cormac McCarthy" to a random normie, you'll probably get No Country or The Road.)
J. D. Salinger — A Perfect Day For Bananafish / For Esmé With Love And Squalor are better than Catcher, although it's perhaps an unfair comparison, because it's much easier to write a near-perfect short story than a near-perfect novel. Also if you're comparing *books*, rather than *works*, the collection ("Nine Stories") isn't better than Catcher. It has two gems, two or three OK, and four or five fillers.
Philip Larkin — This Be The Verse is (in)famous, because it has a popular four-letter word in the first line. But it's not very good. There are many better (Aubade, Whitsun Weddings, Toads, Church Going, etc). If you really want a poem with obscene language, 'High Windows' is much better than TBTV. In fact this is the most extreme case because his most famous poem is not just not his best, it's among his worst.
why do photos of this guy always look so modern? They look like some artsy black and white photograph taken last year
The 50s/60s werent that long ago really.
Does the Pulitzer Prize for fiction writing matter?
It certainly does if you win it, especially if you win and then the higher ups decide to pull the plug and give it to no one instead.