When I'm Sixty-Four

by Cliopatria

In 1936, readers of The Colophon, a book collectors quarterly, were asked to vote on a list the contemporary American authors who would still be read in 2000. On a scale of 1.000, the results were as follows:

Sinclair Lewis .332
Willa Cather .304
Eugene O'Neill .292
Edna St. Vincent Millay .205
Robert Frost .180
Theodore Dreiser .149
James Truslow Adams .115
George Santayana .113
Stephen Vincent Benet .091
James Branch Cabell .090

The list seems remarkable to me in both directions – for who is on it and who isn't. Does anyone read James Truslow Adams anymore? And think of the great writers of American fiction and nonfiction in the first half of the 20th century who didn't make the list! Hat tip.

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HAVH Mayer - 6/11/2007

Is this list really surprising? It includes the two American winners of the Nobel Prize for literature through 1936 (Lewis, O’Neill) and the writer many thought should have won it (Dreiser). The others may be less obvious (although Frost was America’s best-known poet) but they have something important in common: they were “literary” writers who were very widely read, and were over 40.

Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos were younger; Wallace Stevens was older, but his reputation was not yet fully established. The most surprising omission – especially with two women in the top four – may be Edith Wharton (d. 1937), though she was perhaps seen as already fading, and was living abroad; Pearl Buck’s absence is interesting but less surprising.

Book collectors tend to be interested in the best established writers, not the most promising trends, it seems to me.