OK, this one’s just for Campos:
Booth Tarkington is known as an author of popular and slightly saccharine novels about boyhood in Indiana, now surely most famous as the author of The Magnificent Ambersons, which was made by Orson Welles into a wonderful movie that, by all accounts, would be much more wonderful if the studio hadn’t destroyed something like 40 minutes of it while Welles was in Brazil making a left-wing movie which was released posthumously a couple decades ago and itself is not too bad, considering, but nothing like Ambersons. If the missing reels of Ambersons were to ever turn up . . . well, that would be just about the greatest artistic discovery ever, I’d say more so than a missing Leonardo of Joconde quality or a missing Agatha Christie of ABC quality. So, not a bad way for Tarkington to be remembered.
Edna Ferber: OK, I have an Edna Ferber story, kind of. It’s my dad’s best carpooling story. He’s reading a book and somebody else in the car asks who’s it by.
My dad: Thurber.
Other guy: Edna Thurber?
My dad: Edna Thurber? Never heard of her.
Other guy: No, you wouldn’t have.
[Background: James Thurber was a “New Yorker” humorist. Edna Ferber was a popular novelist. Presumably my dad had the reputation as an unintellectual kind of guy.]
Daphne du Maurier: She wrote Rebecca! Most famous as a movie, but the book is considered a classic. We discussed in our recent post, Reading like it’s 1937, where one of our commenters was surprised to learn that they still assign it to high school students.
Of course you could look all this up–ok, not the story from my dad’s carpool–but the point here is what we can remember, right?
For years (before I’d read either of them) I would always confuse Edna Ferber and Edith Wharton…. something to do with an interior filing system.
And James Thurber was no Robert Benchley…. though Veronica Geng learned a lot from both of them.
By the way, does anyone read SJ Perelman any more?
… or Peter de Vries?
The first question is whether people read at all. If they do, who has proven more evanescent… the fiction guys, the comic guys, or the long-form guys? Updike, Cheever? Benchley, Perelman, de Vries? McPhee, Malcolm, Hersey? Instead, we get… Gladwell. Will he be read 80 years from now?
Yes to Perelman. I have a very handsome LOA volume of his writings, ed. Adam Gopnik. Would be yes to De Vries (per one of your commenters) except…isn’t he largely out of print? I found a couple of his books in a used book store a few years back and snatched them up. But…haven’t read them yet. :-)
Since very very few people at all are read after 80 years, it’s a pretty good bet that the tiny number of exceptions won’t include Gladwell.
He’s essentially working the vein of popular psychology, and that tends not to age well even in terms of years, let alone decades. But, in the moment, it’s a living for him, and he does well at it – which is more than most people who try that route.
E.M. Forster/C.S. Forester are hopelessly entangled somewhere in my hippocampus.
My father read to my brother and I Penrod and Sam by Booth Tarkington about 70 years ago. We both very much enjoyed it, as did my father when he was a boy. Thinking back now it was very racist.
I have an advantage because I worked in used book stores for twenty years, so I’m familiar with a lot of “forgotten” authors’ names even if I haven’t read their books. And I remember Booth Tarkington because my father was married to Tarkington’s great-niece for two years. (They got divorced and Dad married my mother a few years later.) Edna Ferber spent part of her youth in my hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, though she was long gone by the time I was born. No personal connection to Daphne du Maurier but I read Rebecca five years ago.
Perhaps they meant that your dad was *too much* of an intellectual – reads the New Yorker! – to be familiar with a popular novelist like Edna Thurber.