We Must Rescue Forgotten Geniuses If We are to Read Them

Apoorva Tadepalli published an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times recently, titled “We Need to Read the Forgotten Geniuses, Not Rescue Them.” As anyone who’s familiar with this site can imagine, this was an article I read with interest. For over forty years, I’ve been fascinated with looking for forgotten writers and reading their books, a fascination that I’ve used this site since 2006 to share, a fascination that led in 2021 to the creation of the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press and my own rescue of a few of my discoveries. So I was eager to learn what Tadepalli had to say and agreed enthusiastically with some of it. But I hope she will allow me the right to quote some of her points and offer my thoughts in response.

“Critics,” she writes, “play a role in determining which books published today should be branded ‘instant classics,’ which authors are best described as ‘little-known’ and which books published in past decades or centuries merit re-examination.”

Ah, if it were this simple. The role of critics in the publishing process is almost entirely post-natal. When a book is first published, critics can influence its sales and its reception by the reading public by what they say in reviews, but few publishers consult any critic when deciding to reissue a book that’s been out of print — and in most cases, consequently out of any critical conversation — for some time. What a reissue publisher, at least any not exclusively targeting an academic audience and sales to university libraries, considers are three questions foremost: Is the book good (meaning of sufficient merit to justify being associated with the imprint)? Is the book in the public domain or are the rights attainable for a reasonable price? Will enough readers buy the book to recoup costs and, with some luck, earn a profit?

The first question — merit — is in the critic’s territory only to the extent that the football is in the territory of a fan watching the game. Except in this case, the stands are deserted, aside perhaps from a lone die-hard or two. We owe the rediscovery of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, for example, to the fact that Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler, two of the more prominent critics of the time, both named the book as one of “The Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years” when queried by The American Scholar magazine. Their enthusiasm for Roth’s novel, along with Irving Howe’s (another influential critic) convinced Avon Books to reissue the book — accompanied by a remarkable amount of advertising, for a paperback edition of a forgotten book, in places like The Saturday Review of Literature.

In the same American Scholar article, however, Morris Bishop, who brought Vladimir Nabokov to Cornell and whose credentials as both critic and scholar are equal to anyone else’s in his generation, recommended Geoffrey Dennis’ The End of the World, a survey of postulations about how the world would end that won the 1930 Hawthornden Prize as the best work of “imaginative literature” published in the U.K. Geoffrey Dennis wrote nine books between 1922 and 1957, all of them getting favorable reviews and none quite like the others in subject, genre, or style. But Morris Bishop’s recommendation did nothing to change Geoffrey Dennis’ fate. All but his as-yet unpublished last book, Till Seven, were out of print in 1956; almost 70 years later, all his books, including Till Seven, are out of print now, and I doubt any working critic on either side of the Atlantic knows his name, let alone the merit of his books. (I have four of his books, by the way, and I would say they’re all intriguing but not immediately gripping, which is why I haven’t made it past page 20 in any of them.)

The second question — availability of rights — is of no interest whatsoever to the critic. If a book he or she loves remains out of print due to difficulties in obtaining the necessary permissions, it may frustrate them but it probably won’t inspire them to set off on the hunt. Unfortunately, for a publisher interested in staying out of civil court, it’s a crucial consideration. Even in the U.K., which has the advantage of a national database of wills, it can be practically impossible to track down who has inherited the copyrights from a dead author. The database, for one thing, is incomplete. There are millions of wills missing. There are plenty of writers who failed recognize their copyrights as inheritable assets and didn’t bother to mention them in the will. And there are plenty of writers who simply didn’t bother to have a will drawn up in the first place. Every publisher involved in the reissue business can name a dozen or more writers they’d love to publish, if only they could find legatees empowered to sign the necessary contracts.

So, we come to the last question: Will enough readers buy the book? This is always a bit of a gamble. Some publishers who specialize in reissuing forgotten books — Persephone, for example — rely heavily on brand loyalty, on a body of readers who will buy a new title out of a base of positive experience with previous books. People scan lists of forthcoming titles from NYRB Classics because they’ve come to trust that their books are going to be well-written, of original style and subject, and well-packaged. Readers operate to a great extent on what statisticians call persistence. If I’ve read three Agatha Christie novels and enjoyed them, I am much more likely to continue buying Agatha Christie novels. Publishers know this and play to it in their choice of books and their presentation of them. Harper Collins uses design templates to make sure that one Poirot novel looks like another. Harlequin Romances and their ilk are the extreme examples of publishing for persistence. I remember once overhearing a conversation between two Harlequin fans in a bookstore (“Oh, 47! I’ve been looking for this!” “You’d like 63, then, or 94”).

But how does a publisher get a reader who knows nothing about the book, the writer, or the publisher’s reputation to look at, let alone buy it? If the publisher has a respectable checking account, they can flood critics, bloggers, BookTok influencers, magazines, and stores with copies and marketing materials to try to win precious review column inches or display table space or staff guinea pig readers. If the publisher is just getting by — which is most of them — then it comes down to developing a reputation, word-of-mouth enthusiasm, and luck.

To summarize, reading forgotten books, and even writing and talking about them, does almost nothing to get anyone else to read them. Just look at this site. Of the hundreds of books I’ve featured here, most are still out of print and forgotten. Once in a while someone reads a piece here that inspires them to go out and find a used copy and read it, and sometimes they even contact me to let me know. But, I am sorry to inform Tadepalli, it’s not enough to read forgotten geniuses. They truly do have to be rescued. And that is the role of the publisher.

She also argues that the literary world overuses “unjustly neglected” as way of trying to justify why a writer’s work is being brought back to print, or worse, of trying to shame critics and readers into paying attention. Which is an absolutely fair criticism. Too often, this comes with a mantle of victimhood. The writer was neglected due to a prevailing prejudice or even some conscious or unconscious conspiracy to slight his or her work and preserve the prestige and sales of established favorites. This is often a simplistic and unhelpful interpretation, however, because it ignores practical factors that often play an even more important role in whether a writer stays in print or falls into oblivion. Herbert Clyde Lewis published a remarkable anti-war fable, Spring Offensive, set in the no-man’s land between France and Germany during the “Phony War.” It hit the bookstores on Monday, May 6, 1940. On Thursday, May 9, 1940, Germany invaded France, ending the Phony War and eliminating most Americans’ interest in anti-war fables. Hitler certainly wasn’t concerned about Herbie Lewis’ little book. It was just a matter of bad timing.

But Tadepalli is looking at the situation through the wrong end of the telescope. The reality is that most writers will be forgotten. Readers don’t have the time or energy to read everything good that’s in print, let alone chase down the far greater number of books that are good and out of print. There are very, very few obsessives like me who dig into the vast piles of forgotten books and try to report back. The canon of well-known, widely taught, in print and easily available writers is only a narrow and well-trodden path through the vast territory called the literature of the past. What lies off that beaten path is much the same as what we see among the new books that are being published today: in other words, great books and awful books and an enormous amount in between.

If people today are going to read a book that lies in the dark, overgrown thickets on either side of the path of the canon, someone has to pick up a machete and start exploring. That exploration is not guaranteed to be fruitful. Just like scientific experimentation, reading a long out of print book, even one that got rave reviews when it came out, isn’t necessarily going to result in another “unjustly neglected” masterpiece worthy of being read today. But without the search, nothing that isn’t already familiar will ever be found.

I have been searching for neglected books for over forty years and the one thing I can say with unshakeable confidence is that there are more great (and even just seriously good) books out there in the thickets off the beaten path of the canon than I or anyone else can ever hope to discover. Because that is the fate of most books and writers: to be forgotten — regardless of their merit or whether they “resonate” with today’s readers. “Unjustly neglected” is not an overused trope of academia and the publishing world: it’s the lot of many, many more writers than all of today’s reissue publishers will ever be able to bring back to print, more than all of today’s readers will ever be able to appreciate.

But that doesn’t mean those books don’t exist or don’t matter or don’t have connections to the canon or don’t illuminate some aspect of our lives. Their writers just weren’t lucky enough to make the journey from being new and unknown to being securely established in the canon seamlessly in the way that Charles Dickens or T. S. Eliot or Doris Lessing did. This is the problem with the canon: it’s short-sighted, erratic, and unreliable. As Tadepalli notes, even Moby Dick, which some would call the greatest American novel, was out of print and forgotten for decades until it was recognized as “unjustly neglected” and rescued by Lewis Mumford, and published as #119 in the Modern Library series.

It’s true that the books and writers that make it into the canon and stay are, generally, good and relevant. But the corollary to this principle is not: what’s neglected is not necessarily justly neglected. Which leaves us with label “unjustly neglected” to apply to the works that we pull from the vast territory of forgotten book and bring back into today’s conversation. If it seems to be overused, that’s only because some folks fail to recognize that there’s more good literature that’s forgotten than not. “To only consume art that was created in our lifetimes is a terrifying thought,” Tadepalli writes. I would say that the same is true if we only consume art that is considered to be in the canon. But many readers won’t go looking beyond what’s familiar (hell, many men still don’t bother to read anything written by women), which is why we need searchers and reporters to find what’s been forgotten and reissue publishers to bring it back into the realm of the familiar.