Rolling dead and forgotten author thread

Thread for RFI and opinions!

Anyone read any Dorothy Richardson?

Heard about her in last night's edition of 'Night Waves' (dedicated to the 70th anniversary of Woolf's Ms Dalloway)

I've been tempted, I have to say--Virago have Pilgramage available as a series of slightly pricey print-on-demands--but am trying not to start any more big complicated series until I read the ones I already have

A good source for interesting looking dead/forgottens is http://writersnoonereads.tumblr.com by the chap who does the amazing A Journey Round My Skull / 50 Watts blog

Interesting, but I don't think in the spirit of this thread. A number of these seem to be highly literary + foreign. So no surprise.

No one I know reads the novelist and painter Alasdair Gray, whose masterpiece, Lanark was published thirty years ago and has been called, by no less a personage than Anthony Burgess, “A shattering work of fiction…”

Maybe I need to make new friends.

Maybe he needs to join ILB, where lots of people read Gray.

No one reads Attila József.

Except most literate Hungarians.

No one reads Krasznahorkai.

C'mon, we've got at least one fired-up Krasznahorkai reader on ILB.

No one reads Cioran.

Lots of people do.

Some of the other names sound interesting, and I bet people here would give them a shot.

Maybe I'm the one who misunderstands. I figured "Dead and Forgotten" meant formerly-popular writers of zero contemporary interest, like
Maarten Maartens.

Click on the website for the edition of Night Waves. As you'll hear the mention of DR comes in all of a sudden...wonder what Woolf thought of her.

What struck me is that she didn't make that much of a mark while alive. She should have had a revival but that hasn't happened, and DR barely (as far as i can tell) registers as a footnote. Glad to see that her books are in print so maybe not that bad. Then started a thread purely on impulse so we can log these as a group. Should have explained, sorry.

Agree a lot of those writers in that blog are well known if you read around. I guess you could widen it to popular then zilch.

Peter de Polnay. Does anybody still read him? He seemed popular in the day. I found Boo weird and unreadable, which now makes me want to reassess. There was another one I turned the pages of without much success.

Oh but yeah, I'm not sure that blog's quite right - that's more like 'less well known authors that are worth reading and probably will be revived by a classics brand at some point soon'.

Definitely--I've read maybe 1/3 of the people he mentions. I use it more as a guide to interesting writers I'm unfamiliar with who might be worth checking out

Would Anna Kavan count?

OK, just looked at that website, Raymond Queneau is ridiculous.

i don't think there's been a time when more of kavan's work has been in print than now, which indicates someone's reading her at least.

speaking of which, i've been reading a book put out a couple of years ago about her time in nz during the early forties, which includes the previously unpublished stories she wrote during that period (very different than anything of hers i've read before: much less inward focused) and goes a long way to demystifying the creation of her biographers. also the person she followed out here is interesting in himself, pretty sure i've read a fictionalisation of him in a maurice gee novel too.

my nominations for this thread: richard jefferies and "mark rutherford".

also, maybe never popular but more or less forgotten(?): kenneth patchen.

New Ferdinand Mount book Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us has a bit of stuff on Jefferies apparently – he's like a nature-and-ethics hero for Mount. But I don't think I've seen his name much before, outside After London.

lol new directions reprinted a patchen collection a few months ago w/ a forward by devandra barnhart so I think his name/work is still floating around

but yeah I def think memoirs or a shy pornographer is worth a cursory look at by anyone, there is still something pretty shocking about what he can sometimes do with prose, but man, when he's off he's wayyyyy off, and he just falls off in the span of a couple pages sometimes

^i've spent the last half decade trying to avoid barnhart's music/influence and now this? new directions also put out a new edition of celine's journey to the end of the night awhile ago with some obnoxiously and badly written sub-celine intro which stopped me replacing the copy i stupidly sold years ago.

john fowles was a big jefferies fan (he wrote the intro for the oxford classics edition of after london) and mentions him as an "unconcious influence" in the introduction to the revised version of the magus, and you sometimes see comparisons between jefferies and lawrence (who apparently detested jefferies' work). amaryllas at the fair (his last novel) actually reminded me strongly of lawrence's shorter work, and for victorian writing is pretty atypical. other than that, the only mention of jefferies i can recall was some old study of mysticism covering his "nature worship" in 'the story of my heart' (which is an interesting read as well).

and on the new directions tip, i think it'll be a long wait before edward dahlberg gets a hipster-baiting foreword to entice a new readership(but i guess you never know).

Speaking of forgotten Greenwich Village types, Alfred Kreymborg.

Honestly Julio, sometimes I think you're a mindreader. Just finished the first vol of "Pilgrimage", which I very much enjoyed (as did V Woolf according to the cover blurbage). It's sort of groping towards the stream-of-consciousness thing without being there fully-formed yet.

I'll be delighted to read the rest of the series when I find them secondhand (although I do know an ilxor who has the run and has offered them to me for a lend).

Good stuff, let me know how you get on with the other vols sometime.

Might have to borrow the first one, if that's ok? (but that reminds me I already was going to borrow Oe's A Personal Matter, too) :-)

The more popular or well-known once, yet the more completely forgotten now, the better.

Samuel Rutherford Crockett
Maurice Hewlett
Stanley J. Weyman
Harold Bell Wright (!)

In German: Hermann Sudermann

President Keyes was talking about sci-fi novelist Wendy Walker in some ILM thread; don't know if she's dead, but she certainly seems unread...

don't know if this is the same Wendy Walker, but quite a read, and pretty much pertaining to this thread:
http://exploringfictions.blogspot.com/2010/02/wendy-walker-sexual-stealing-on-gothic.html

Yes that's her. She's way more rad than I even imagined!!!

Been reading William Faulkner: A Literary Companion which is a compendium of criti0cal reception of his Yoknapatawpha novels as they came out in real time. One writer that he gets (unfavorably) compared with is T.F. Powys. I don't know if Powys is famous and still read or not; I've never heard of him until I started reading the aforementioned book.

I know a couple of T F Powys fans, & I've heard lots of good things about Unclay (just seen this review, makes me think I really should read it); but his brother, John Cowper Powys is better known (and has some fans on here iirc).

reminds me: my local library also has Man of Straw, by Heinrich Mann, who's fairly obscure in the US, I guess. I like Thomas, should I read this?

It's a good book, but I think the only English translation (which is the version I've read) is seriously abridged, and it shows a bit. Professor Unrat, which was the basis for 'The Blue Angel', is better.

Oh yeah, I'll have to look for that, thanx

Powys brothers obviously weird and fascinating, but only read Wolf Solent (laboriously fucked up pastoral - enjoyable tho) and about half of Porius. They somehow seem too ponderous to fully contemplate investigating fully, but I might get a kick if/when I go and see that Writing the Land exhibition at the British Library.

Whenever this thread is revived it always makes me think I must have another go at Peter de Polnay, even though I haven't read anything I've hitherto liked by him. Odd.

s seward to thread maybe - he recommended Wolf Solent and might have read a few more.

don't know if this is the same Wendy Walker, but quite a read, and pretty much pertaining to this thread:
http://exploringfictions.blogspot.com/2010/02/wendy-walker-sexual-stealing-on-gothic.html

― dow, Monday, June 25, 2012 6:48 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah that's definitely the same ww I was talking about. She's awesome. And her husband Tom Lafarge.

Too bad green integer seemingly doesn't want to publish her newer stuff

That article was way cool

rex warner?

dead & forgotten author i'd like to read if i could find any of his work: tom mallin

Warner's The Aerodrome was one of Anthony Burgess' 99 best post-1939 novels (there was also a tv adaptation on the BBC many years ago)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-nine_Novels

Warner also did lots of translations for Penguin Classics, and wrote some of his own modern interpretations of tales from Ovid etc.

looking around, seems moorcock did an intro to one of his republished novels and ballard was a fan.

did read the aerodrome and the professor years ago and have been thinking about revisiting and maybe checking out some of his others. though those two did seem very much of their time/place; probably helped by the editions i read being wwii era penguins complete with ads in the back for anthrax free shaving brushes. think it might have been a mention by orwell that alerted me to warner... inside the whale, maybe?

pretty sure I read The Wild Goose Chase many years back. pretty sure Warner's history as a scab during the General Strike turned me off him. so long ago tho.

don't know if this is the same Wendy Walker, but quite a read, and pretty much pertaining to this thread:
http://exploringfictions.blogspot.com/2010/02/wendy-walker-sexual-stealing-on-gothic.html

― dow, Monday, 25 June 2012 23:48 (3 years ago)

Excellent piece, thankyou!

Have I read any of these?
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20171010-the-great-writers-forgotten-by-history

Alexander Baron is indeed excellent. Same with Julian Maclaren-Ross.
Patrick Dennis not so much... Auntie Mame is an acquired taste I did not acquire.
Frank Baker's The Birds is very good too, and if du Maurier had not read it then the similarities are astonishing.

I grew up with dozens of Frank Richards books in the house so that's a little off base for me. Loved them and still enjoy dipping into a Bunter book every now and then. As for the others, one of them portrayed by Johnny Depp, another had a recent film adaptation with Amy Adams. I'm not sure they're forgotten, just a bit old-fashioned.

I've got an unread Braddon collection.

There's no way Ann Radcliffe is forgotten, she still gets taught in universities, she has hundreds of reviews on goodreads and you often see her in the classics section of bookshops. However I was recently discussing with others how rarely she is discussed by horror people.

I don't think that Depp thing is getting a sequel any time soon