How Does an Author’s Reputation Shape Your Response to a Book?

The overlying issue, of course, is: Does a 14-18 year old have the knowledge, street-smarts, academic strength, or emotional capacity to actually enjoy/be entertained/or other wise influenced by a "Finnegan's Wake, "Paradise Lost, or "Beowolf?" (Or does their teacher have the capacity to comment/elucidate or... Yikes!) This with respect to tomes written by authors in mid-life with years of "editing" mixed in...

An absolutely brilliant, and incisive, answer to the posed question of October 11. Be proud and know I respect your brevity. Cheers. J

I read the slush pile at "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction" for 8 years, from 1966 to 1974, going in once a week to sort through anywhere from 100 to 140 unsolicited manuscripts. The ultra-short stories of under 500 words were usually rejected—none of the writers measured up to Fredric Brown, master of the short-short—while poetry, seldom published, also got the boot. Holiday stories sent in during the holidays were also rejected; most authors have no idea what sort of lead time magazines require. Then there were so many stories with punchline endings: "We'll go to the third planet: the natives call it 'Earth'" or "Eve? Gosh, my name's Adam!" Some of those were 25,000 words, and most ended badly.

Occasionally there was a gem among the dross; I pulled Suzette Haden Elgin's first published story from the piles, and it went on to be published and anthologized many times.

I was paid a pittance, yes ($25 a week), but did my best by the magazine and the authors. We sent them rejection forms, with sometimes a note encouraging more submissions—which was usually a mistake; they sent in their vast files of unpublishable stories. But sometimes...

All life is a is a judgement call, whether of unpublished stories, where to live, who to marry, or what to have for dinner. Heller failed the writers and her employers. I hope her subsequent life judgements have been wiser.

Joan here. Name in Maggie's account. Just have to agree with the minor mention by Ms. Heller of Elena Ferrante. I keep being told that this is great literature. I'm part way through book 3 and scratching my head. Ferrante can write...her head off...and tell a good long involved story, but it's not great by any stretch of my imagination. Or is it the translation...which is also at times not so great.

It's actually a lot better to see where that bandwagon might take you than to boast about your bad taste. I don't think I've ever discovered that I was right to scorn some classic; I don't think I have ever felt confirmed in a negative first or even tenth impression. It's actually been amazing to me to discover, later in life (and to take myself as an example), how wonderful Dryden and Pope and Charlotte Brontë are, and how wrong I was to dismiss them, just because almost nothing can be greater than Paradise Lost. (Actually, I will make an exception for Silas Marner, which I cannot teach myself to like. But I think that's probably a loss for me.)

There's a reason authors have reputations, and we should make use of them to see whether they might not deserve a second or a tenth look. Montaigne will survive Heller's scorn. But I would be sorry if she encouraged readers to miss out on reading him.

Often, it is an intertwined effect of the reputation of the author and the desired reputation of the reader--think of how often self-styled intellectuals will only describe thrillers they loved as "guilty pleasures" or "airplane/beach books" rather than simply praise them as well-written?

Reputations certainly also have a major impact on the buying of books, aside from on the reaction to books--what percentage of buyers of David Foster Wallace's famous Infinite Jest ever finished it? What percentage of Salman Rushdie buyers are buying because of his writing, rather than his brand?

Reputation, as defined by Dictionary.com, is "the estimation in which a person or thing is held, especially by the community or the public generally." I submit that there is another community that sits in judgment of authors -- the community of years. And it is the years that have the final say. Patterson will be forgotten. Milton will always be with us.

I think that the statistical answer to the question "How Does an Author’s Reputation Shape Your Response to a Book?" is "Make me want to buy it." After all, look at all the books churned-out assembly-line fashion by James Patterson. For instance, in 2015, Patterson had 17 books! Only 1 or 2 did not have a co-author. Yet they all sold, not because of "co-authors" Maxine Paetro, Chris Grabenstein, or Chris Tebbets, but because Patterson's name is large on the cover.

To find no joy in Milton when your are 18 is unsurprising - to find no greatness in Milton when you are 30 is slothful.

One advantage of borrowing books from the library is the opportunity to read books by authors you know nothing about. Receiving books from friends who are down-sizing is also a good way to read new authors. I put off reading classics until my old age, which now is apparently upon me. They seem to be more entertaining when read voluntarily and with a broad background in reading.

Like smartphone market dominance, often soaring literary reputations arise from having been the first to do something. For example, I submit that "Darkness at Noon" or "1984" would not receive comparable acclamation and Classic status were they released today. In terms of sheer literary merit, I would much prefer "The Case of Comrade Tulayev," an obscure novel dramatizing the Stalinist purges and written by a Bolshevik apostate who took the pseudonym Victor Serge and was published long after the author's death (after reading the book I read Susan Sontag's introduction and was delighted to learn that she agrees with me). The same may be true for "To Kill a Mockingbird." For a tale dramatizing southern racism corrupting the American judicial system and a wrongly accused black man including a legal drama, and redemption through surviving oppression, I prefer Ernest Gaines's "A Lesson Before Dying," as literature. Other examples abound of course. Being first to market counts for a lot.

An author's reputation interferes with a reader's experience of that author's writing. I always try to read a book and get my own experience of it, no matter what others say.

There are plenty of so-called classical writers that I dislike or see nothing of value to me personally in them. Other classics I can admit I didn't even understand enough to grasp what might be interesting in them.

And there are plenty of contemporary books that meet the former criteria. Interestingly enough, there are no contemporary books that I can't understand. I just dislike or see nothing of value in most of them.

The books I tend to read are books from the past that are not considered "classics' but are quite good and just never got enough attention to be well known.

The classic case of prospective readers avoiding a writer's work due to over-familiarity with his reputation and image is probably Hemingway. He actively promoted himself as a macho celebrity once he passed the age of thirty, and women especially would likely be deflected by this image from experiencing the work of a writer whose stories and novels had a greater influence in the 20th century than virtually any other writer.

Ms. Heller's view is, of course, largely correct, it seems, since it is entirely reasonable. But this way of looking at the question avoids two other questions. The first is the question about whether we are capable of really assessing the merits of a work if we don't know how to read it. Her mention of Milton brings this to mind for me. I find Milton very difficult, and in such a way that I can't yet say whether he is a good poet or not. But this raises the second question. I might keep trying to learn how to read Milton because of his longstanding place in our literary ranks. By (some measure of) deference to his reputation, it would seem not misplaced to keep trying. I suspect that eventually such effort could lead to an understanding of how to read him, which would likely coincide with seeing finally what all the fuss had been about. At least this kind of scenario is one I have experienced in the past. These latter remarks make me hesitant to give much credence to whether I or those around me "care for" this or that author or work. That seems like a poor measure for assessment.