Sunday, June 06, 2010

Nonentities

THAT few of the New Yorker’s “Twenty Under Forty” are known to literary people, far less to the general public, shows the extent to which literature has become marginalized in American culture, pushed into a smaller and smaller corner. Every decade the condition deteriorates. The trendline is clear. Yet establishment promoters insist that “All is well.”

THINK that once such a list could’ve consisted of the names Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, DosPassos, Steinbeck, Porter, among others, and you realize the extent of the drop off.

2 comments:

Harland said...

Faulkner, for one, never managed to get published in the New Yorker, even after he'd won the Nobel.

King Wenclas said...

To his credit.
(Though I'm sure he could've used the booze money. I hear they pay pretty good.)