Most overated author?

Thanks for bringing up Melville. :p I think he's trash. No one paid attention to him until he was adopted as a hero among the Jazz Age literati, and since then no one has questioned that he's a "classic," but I think he ought to have been forgotten at the bottom of the dump heap.

Kafka I like well enough, but his writing strikes me of amateurish at times. I would catagorize Kafka as a "pleasant read" for the more morose of us.

I would also add to the list the name of Thomas Hardy. Don't know that he's held in especially high esteem, but I wouldn't recommend him to anybody, even for light bedtime reading. Absolutely dripping with the melodramatic contructs of his day.

Although I've never actually read too far by him, how about Marcel Proust. I can't speak from experience, but from what I've read elsewhere about him he seems he would be acheingly tedious.

I think Steinbeck is over-rated. I enjoy his novels (my favorite so far is Cannery Row), but they're just not as super-great as people make them out to be. By the time I graduated high school, among the various required English classes I took, I had gone through, in considerable depth, both The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men twice. Not even the works of Shakespeare enjoyed this much attention. Maybe the social commentary in those books made them attractive to teachers (especially in California, perhaps) due to the abundance of possible essay and discussion topics, and thus everyone gets the impression that Steinbeck is a great writer from a young age.

At any rate, at least Steinbeck is a step up from Margaret Mitchell.

Stephen King. I've read one thing by him that was good in my opinion, a short story starring Sherlock Holmes but realing featuring Doctor Watson as the real solver of the puzzle, and having Holmes and Lestrade conspire to cover up the crime in the interests of the family. The rest is ravings. He is like the old pulp writers, you love him or hate him.

Perhaps this is heresy since he is my favorite classic author, but Twain is slighly overrated. He came to live on his reputation, not his writing towards the end of his life, and a lot of it lacks the wit and spark that made Twain who he was.

Melvile should be read aloud in the garden to bore the inscects off the vegetables. It would be better than pesticide. http://www.smileyville.net/aiwan/pleasantry.gif

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Originally Posted by bluevictim

I think Steinbeck is over-rated. I enjoy his novels (my favorite so far is Cannery Row), but they're just not as super-great as people make them out to be. By the time I graduated high school, among the various required English classes I took, I had gone through, in considerable depth, both The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men twice. Not even the works of Shakespeare enjoyed this much attention.

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I agree. Steinbeck is pretty good, but not even near superstar status.

Steinbeck is the greatest!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :banana: :banana: :banana: :thumbs_up :thumbs_up Nobody disagree or I'll fight em.I'm kidding, but seriously he's the man.

Perhaps David Eddings, who is pretty famous despite the obvious flaws in his books (which are, in the end, just about black'n'white superhero-beating-evil).

I've never posted here before, but as overrated authors is one of my favorite subjects, I have to join in.

Ultimately, I think you can make a case for any author being overrated. A work has to stand alone, and often more credit is given to the person than the work, and it's sometimes unbalanced.

With that in mind, I think Joyce is one of the least overrated writers because his writing is staggeringly good. His books (especially Ulysses) have very little going for them in terms of story, but the writing is mind-blowing. Criticize him all you want for readability--I do--but it's excellently crafted.

More or less the same goes for Pynchon, who I'm surprised no one mentioned yet. I give him less credit than Joyce because he's not as much of an innovator, but there's so much craftsmanship in his works that I have to respect his writing even if I don't understand it. Maybe it's misguided to respect what you can't understand, but I enjoy being a naive reader on occasion.

People I think are overrated: Charlotte Bronte, Robert Browning (poets and critics alike give him too much credit for the dramatic monologue), and T.S. Eliot (who I love, but The Waste Land actually isn't that great).

No book has ever made me cry more than the end of "Grapes of Wrath".

Grapes of Wrath deeply effected me.It made me believe in human goodness.

Grapes of Wrath deeply effected me.It made me believe in inhuman badness.

As well. ;)

Grapes of Wrath deeply affected me. It cured my insomnia. ;)

To each his own my friend.

My list: Dan Brown, Harold Robins, Danielle Steel, H. c. Mahler, Wilbur Smith, Helen Fielding,

It appears that everyone hates Dan Brown.Why so?I never read any of his books,but I've been meaning to get the Da Vinci Code.It seems pretty popular to normal folks, but serious literature fans hate it.