Neglected Books

I am thinking about writing for the Look2 Essay. Specifically, I am thinking of revising and combining my posts on Raintree County into an essay on why that novel is neglected.

What I did not know was how much writing there was on neglected books. The Neglected Books Page has become quite well-known (it has its own Wikipedia page. Bookishly has an interview with its founder, An Interview with Brad Bigelow of The Neglected Books Page. This site inspired Modern Novel with its own Neglected books/authors and The New York Society Library's Lost in the Stacks: The Overlooked, Underrated, Neglected, and Forgotten (which has links to similar articles on this subject).

From Neglected Books, I found Los Angeles Times Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium - interesting not only for its choices but the ones making those choices; and a list from Antaeus magazine.

American Scholar might have started this whole thing back in 1970. Then LitHub did Ten Great Writers Nobody Reads (which also was influenced by the Neglected Books site, and mentions Miss Macintosh, My Darling and Jane Bowles were all I recognized), but inspired a reprint by American Scholar under the title Neglected Books Revisited, Part 1. Which is also fun for seeing who contributed to the list - check out Issac Asimov and Samuel Beckett. LitHub produced another list under the headline 11 Forgotten Books of the 1920s Worth Reading Now  - I read Babbitt in college and find it hard to think of as forgotten; I have heard of Edna Ferber and Elmer Rice, but I never thought to read Federer or have seen a book by Rice.

Back in 2013 Open Culture published “Neglected Books” You Should Read: Here’s Our List; Now We Want Yours. I did leave Melville' s The Confidence Man, and think it's good, even if not as madly ambitious as Moby-Dick, but it is much fore accessible. The same site also has 20 Books People Pretend to Read (and Now Your Confessions?) - not sure what it means, but I did read them.

From Caustic Cover Critic and 2020 75 Excellent But Neglected Books - enough outrageous stuff, not all fiction, that would keep me busy for the next year.

The Guardian published The 10 best Neglected literary classics - in pictures of which I knew none of the books and only two writers, and of the writers I have only read H.G. Wells. From the descriptions, I found many that do sound very interesting.

Robert Fay published on his blog The Five Most Neglected Novels of the 20th Century. Of these, I knew of The Leopard (I did see the movie!), had read The Sheltering Sky, and had heard of Richard Yates.

Five years ago, The Irish Independent reviewed a book, The Book of Forgotten Authors, Christopher Fowler, Quercus Editions under Forgotten treasures. Not to be outdone, The Rish Times has A library of neglected gems: books that deserve to be better read. From the latter, I got a surprise: Gore Vidal's Duluth. I read it back in the Nineties, and I thought it better than anything else of his I had read.

Australia has its own concerns with neglected writers: Three neglected women writers of the 1930s: Jean Campbell, 'Capel Boake', and 'Georgia Rivers.

From English publishers Cranthorpe Millner, I found Neglected Women Writers. As much as I have been reading these past few years of Jean Rhys, I have to wonder about perspective and/or definitions.

I guess I think if a provincial like me has read it, it is not neglected. Too many books I think I should have read and have not. Of the lists above, I must say I found many I would like to read, not much overlap, and plenty to share.

sch 12/14/22