Who was the most recent author who, purely via book writing, had a celebrity status as great as tv/film celebrities?
AND, who was the most recent literary (e.g. no young adult, genre fiction, erotica, etc) author who had the same?
AND, who was the most recent literary (e.g. no young adult, genre fiction, erotica, etc) author who had the same?
Comments
Thanks Zach!
If we’re excluding genre fiction that axes King and Vonnegut so uh maybe Truman Capote?
In my world, Ottessa Moshfegh is a huge literary writer.
Booktok has siloed a lot of different areas of publishing. The culture is indeed not as centralized.
Colleen Hoover? Sally Rooney?
Category 2: Pynchon, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie, and Toni Morrison.
Like remind me what is the current year in Infinite Jest?
#bookstodon
(2) Hilary Mantel or Sally Rooney
All of them are some kind of genre fiction though, maybe Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg?
And of course, me.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
(Wipes eyes)🤣🤣🤣🤣 Hoo boy I crack myself up.
2. Dickens, maybe?
Stephen king
James Patterson
Terry McMillan
Nikki Giovanni
Maya Angelou
Also, Kurt Vonnegut was famous enough, he had a cameo in "Back to School" where the joke depended upon audiences recognizing him
Neil Gaiman maybe.
I'm going to stop talking about these people now. Ugh.
For the second category... Gore Vidal? Saul Bellow? Vonnegut? Or do you have to go back to Steinbeck or Hemingway?
Prior to her you're probably talking either Stephen King or Danielle Steele.
Neil Gaiman, yes. Stephen King, maybe. John Grisham, Dan Brown, or Danielle Steel, probably not.
might very well hold the honours in Science. At 79 I discovered you back on twitter because my son told me ‘Dad, you have to follow this guy. He’s brilliant’. I use your cartoons in teaching a course to upskill Teachers of Mathematics.
But these days, any mildly successful book gets turned into a movie. It would make more sense to ask if fame came before.
My consumption is also in fits and starts. I'm on my third book in a week but it may have been months since the last one.
Publishing is more accessible so writers have more competition. Close to a billion books sold each year lately in US.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gfbZwxMR8GA
Hollywood markets movies as “Stephen King’s _____” because he is a bigger draw than the literal movie stars in the cast!
(His writing contains SF and fantasy elements, but let's not be pedantic here, he is clearly identified as a non-genre literary writer.)
Although it's a pretty fuzzy boundary. Putting Midnight's Children, The Handmaid's Tale, or The Road on the literary-fiction shelves is as much marketing as anything else.
Literary is harder, I’m honestly not sure.
Ken Follett
Stephen King bigger than most tv and many film celebs.
We don’t count Joanne anymore
He was hugely popular in print back then.
Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, LeGuin, Vonnegut... These are all science fiction/fantasy writers. But their books don't go on the SFF shelves.
I’m not a literary buff by any stretch, so I’m not sure if that is already true of the category.
If something is actually really good, it ceases to be genre fiction. That's why Vonnegut isn't considered Science Fiction despite the presence of aliens and supercomputers in his books.
The second? That's harder to say, if only because of the broad destigmatizing of genre fiction in the last c.50 years.
Well, in my book, anyway.
Meanwhile in my head lit is 'books where nothing interesting is happening, on purpose, just people interacting. Or not'
And your distinction about genre fiction is arbitrary but maybe Salman Rushdie? He's not exactly as famous as Tom Cruise though.
In Japan, Oe feels like he is still the ultimate arbiter of taste and a darling of the left. Murakami was/is a king of sales still.
My partner just threw out "Unfortunately, JD Vance"
I also could think of a couple of self-help authors that meet that criteria, but most have shifted to grift and political pandering over time - J Peterson notably.
When it comes to non-genre, my thought is that the authors that gained fame usually did so by good writing + either scandal/politics (Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn) or by their other activities (Hemingway & bullfighting, Capote & social circles).
https://lithub.com/the-living-authors-with-the-most-film-adaptations/
and then he posts some wishy washy quippy lib nonsense
My suspicion is that writers are shut-ins and don't like attention.
In the olden days of vain writers: Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer.
I guess this means my expiration date is around the 80s-90s.