Ranking Our Writers

Perhaps it's not really useful to rank writers in order of their reputation, their fame, their success with critics or with other readers. If a story works for you, if you enjoy it and if it makes you think about the world in a new way, then it's a good story. It doesn't matter what other people think of it.

And yet, I think that it would be interesting to see how the world judges the writers that we are reading.

In the first rank we have Hemingway and Faulkner. People will be reading them as long as they are reading the English language. These two guys are "in," and not simply because they have the Nobel Prize--a lot of writers get the Nobel prize and they're completely forgotten ten years later. Their writing is now more than fifty years old, and it is as popular as ever. Enough time has passed for us to see that these two guys are not going away.

Then there is the second rank. Older writers who are very solid, but who are judged by a lot of critics and scholars and readers to be too simple. Maugham is here. He is older than Faulkner and Hemingway, and he is probably just as popular with readers today as they are, but for a lot of professors, scholars, people who write books that judge other books, he seems a little too obvious, too easy. Maugham himself thought that it was very hard to be obvious; he thought that someone like Faulkner was sometimes more complicated than he needed to be. But Maugham himself said once about his fame, his reputation: "I am a first-rate writer of the second rank." Not a bad place to be.

Pritchett is also in the second rank. Pritchett will probably be remembered for writing essays on thousands of books. He read and knew Western literature like nobody else. He was super-solid. Like with Maugham, that is not enough. Pritchett never wrote a "big" novel. Still, some of his stories, like "You Make Your Own Life," will always be read, always remembered.

Then there is the third rank. Francine Prose and Raymond Carver and Jhumpa Lahiri are here. Epstein is here too, although maybe not because of the stories. Epstein is more famous for writing essays--about other writers, about culture, and about life in general. They are solid and good, but so recent that it is too early to tell if he will survive. We don't judge who will survive; time judges. As Francine Prose herself said once, "You can assume that if a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics..." I am excited about seeing what will happen to these two, how they will be judged, in the next fifty years.