Who is the most underrated writer ever?

[Kyriakos]

A companion to the other thread

Although i guess the most underrated writers are not even largely known, i think we can discuss some which are a bit known, but not nearly as much as we think they deserve to be.

I would like to nominate Constantine Cavafy. He is rapidly becomming more and more famous, but i think he deserves a spot in the pantheon of best poets of recent aeons.

Nerval is a bit on the periphery of letters these days too.

[Lokasenna]

To bang my usual drum, I have long since come to the conclusion that Tolkien is the greatest writer of the 20th century, and it continually surprises me that he is not recognized as such. Feel free to pelt me with rancid tomatoes, or whatever makes you happy, for challenging the orthodoxy.

On a similar-ish note, I think Lovecraft is generally ignored, though his academic star is slowly on the rise. He might have been firmly in the realm of pulp fiction, but the man was a very talented wordsmith whose gift for evoking the disturbing and the grotesque is almost certainly on a level with Poe.

Finally, a recent one that troubles me is the seeming lack of interest in Gore Vidal amongst the academic community at the moment. He's clearly important, but almost no one seems to be writing on him. Very odd.

[Desolation]

There's no doubt in my mind that there have been writers out there who were on par with the greats, but who never got published for one reason or another...So, they would probably be the most under-rated.

Drawing from writers who have been published, I'd go with William Gaddis and Flann O'Brien...Both are mildly well-known, but not as often read/discussed as many of their peers (like Thomas Pynchon and Samuel Beckett, respectively).

[kev67]

I am sometimes surprised that Larry McMurtry rarely seems to be regarded as being amongst the top authors. His work does not seem to feature highly (if at all) in the top ## lists.

[Summer M]

[...] I think Lovecraft is generally ignored [...] the man was a very talented wordsmith whose gift for evoking the disturbing and the grotesque is almost certainly on a level with Poe.

Thou shalt not take the name of the Poe on vain! Seriously, there is no comparison. First, Lovecraft was sort of a monomaniac with the Cthulhu-type creatures and the "we're alone in a hostile universe" theme. Poe was far more versatile.

Second, Lovecraft was quite tedious. I gave up on At the Mountains of Madness when the line "I'll never forget those horrible creatures", or something like that, was repeated for the fiftieth time.

Lovecraft was a good writer, but nowhere near Poe.

[stlukesguild]

Loka... I agree with you with regard to Lovecraft (Literature that gets classified under certain genre... science fiction/horror/mystery... always gets the short shift) and certainly Vidal. Read him, people!!! But we'll have to agree to disagree when it comes to Tolkein.

[stlukesguild]

Fernando Pessoa! His reputation has certainly grown over the years... after being virtually an unknown... but come on! This guy should be spoken of in the same hushed tones as afforded to T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Beckett, J.L. Borges, and Italo Calvino!!

[dfloyd]

an obvious answer would have been F. Scott Fitzgerald. But academia discovered him, and today there is hardly a college student who doesn't have him as assigned reading and the bookstores are filled with his novels such as The Great Gatsby or Tender Is the Night.

Today it is the American Nobel prize winner Sinclair Lewis. When I was in college in the 1960s, his novels were hard to come by, and 50 years later I haven't seen his works in the book stores.

Academia feels his novels outdated so he wont be rediscovered as was Scott Fitzgerald. How many of you on this forum have read Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Arrowsmith, Doddsworth, It Can't Happen Here, et al.

[Jack of Hearts]

The Italian writer Giovanni Arpino. He's mostly unknown in the US, and probably in most of Europe too. But he wrote a work called Il buio e il miele (Darkness and Honey). It doesn't exist in English (had to read it in French translation), but you all know it as the inspiration behind the 1990's Al Pacino film Scent of a Woman. The book is world class literature, as are his other works The Novice and A Crime of Honor (both fairly rare but available in English- maybe only one printing in the 1960's).








J

[Anton Hermes]

I'd go with William Gaddis and Flann O'Brien...Both are mildly well-known, but not as often read/discussed as many of their peers (like Thomas Pynchon and Samuel Beckett, respectively).

I'd agree that Gaddis and Flann O'Brien aren't very well known among average readers, but that only points out the cult-author paradox that makes these overrated/underrated debates futile: people who are familiar with their work claim they're the greatest writers of all time!

I'd add that I think they're both amazing writers, regardless of their "rating."

[Summer M]

Today it is the American Nobel prize winner Sinclair Lewis. When I was in college in the 1960s, his novels were hard to come by, and 50 years later I haven't seen his works in the book stores.

Academia feels his novels outdated so he wont be rediscovered as was Scott Fitzgerald. How many of you on this forum have read Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Arrowsmith, Doddsworth, It Can't Happen Here, et al.

!

Lewis was a genius, and his works were brilliant tragicomic portraits of American society. It's a shame he's been forgotten, because so much of what he's written is relevant today.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Bukowksi!

[Jack of Hearts]

The Buk getting pissed







J

[tonywalt]

Bukowski (books and poetry)

Raymond Carver.

Also David Foster Wallace never got the commercial success he should have gotten (albeit tons of critical acclaim)

Lorrie Moore one of the better authors out there but has not written a whole lot.

[GatorAbe]

Richard Yates

What a loss it would've been had the recent movie Revolutionary Road, or the republication of his short stories into a single volume, or oddly enough, Toa Lin titling his most recent novel Richard Yates not brought the deserved attention to his works.

For his period, I'd put his short stories right up there with the likes of Cheever and Carver (also underrated.) and his singular short stories collections, especially Liars in Love, up there with other famous 20th century collections such as Tales from the Jazz Age, Flappers & Philosphers, Dubliners, and In Our Time.

I've also always thought Yates served as an invisible transition point between F. Scott Fitzgerald 1920's works and Carver, Ford, and Russo more minimalistic styles. His sentences and story structure beckon Fitzgerald yet he shaves away a lot of Fitzgerald's loftier language and moments, seemingly easing the way for the purely minimalistic methods Carver was famous for.