The Most Criminally Overlooked or Underrated Writers Ever List

[Sir Thursday]

Also worth noting that when the BBC did a poll of Britain's favourite books in 2003, Gormenghast made the top 100 (#84). So a lot of people do like it, apparently!

ST

[Sun]

George Gissing. Not necessarily underrated, but certainly under read.

[The Killer Snark]

I'd dearly love to place Peake, one of my favourite writers ever, here, except it's superfluous to do so. Directly from his death, he's achieved a permanent recognition as a 'classic', and wide readership to this day, and it's safe to say by this point he will never be forgotten. I've heard of The Darkling Hills, btw. I've just never checked it out.

[Jiriki]

Can you source this at all? All the information i'm finding speaks to the contrary.

Yep, I can source it. It'll have to wait until I get home, though. (Because my Peake Studies are at home)

He had a BBC production of Titus Groan before he'd even finished Titus Alone, and most critics at the time gave pretty favorable reviews of his books.

TG was well received. G and TA (especially TA) were not, and both were remaindered. I'll source when I get home.

He didn't finish the books due to Parkinson's and death, not so much low sales.

This is true. But low sales were certainly a factor in his publisher choosing not to reprint; "Boy in Darkness" was out of print for over 50 years in the United States.

[Darth Richard II]

The fuck? Gormenghast is a fucking classic.

Mght as well as bring up Tolkien. Do you guys not know what overlocked/underrated means?

[Metopheles]

The fuck? Gormenghast is a fucking classic.

Mght as well as bring up Tolkien. Do you guys not know what overlocked/underrated means?

Sometimes, people are from different countries and there these authors are unknown, or, authors are classics or praised, but are not widely read or known except by some critics.

[Jiriki]

The fuck? Gormenghast is a fucking classic.

Mght as well as bring up Tolkien. Do you guys not know what overlocked/underrated means?

The word was overlooked (not "overlocked"), and yes, I'm aware of what it means. When certain Peake works are out of print for decades, I think that qualifies as overlooked and underrated.

[peterbound]

Sometimes, people are from different countries and there these authors are unknown, or, authors are classics or praised, but are not widely read or known except by some critics.

Maybe, but that isn't the case this time.

[peterbound]

The word was overlooked (not "overlocked"), and yes, I'm aware of what it means. When certain Peake works are out of print for decades, I think that qualifies as overlooked and underrated.

Dafuq?

per 'Peake studies': 1968–69: the three Titus books republished in hardback and paperback (asPenguin Modern Classics); they have remained in print ever since, regularly selling thousands of copies a year.

ETA: Also love the edit nazi coming out.

We have this every time someone makes an obscure book, or overlooked thread (there is one already in case the search function is out of order). People want so bad for their author to be a special find, they have a hard time understanding that they are as much of a commercial success as the next guy. This doesn't take away from them as artists. Believe me.

But ya, on this one you seem to be way off. You kind of have a track record for that.

[Darth Richard II]

Yes, I mis typed a word. The shame.

[dietl]

Am I the only functioning AI here?

[Metopheles]

Do you all know Charlotte Roche ?

She might be overlooked around the world

[peterbound]

Do you all know Charlotte Roche ?

She might be overlooked around the world

North America checking in.

She is known here.

[Darth Richard II]

Chances are unless you found a book in an old used book store that never gets rid of things that don't sell covered in layers of dust, your book is not overlooked/underrated/what have you.

[sologdin]

as datepalm pointed out, i busted the cherry on goodreads for woman and her master (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14495247-woman-and-her-master), a truly horrible bit of porn/harlequin-style exoticism. maybe it's obscure, but if so, it's overlooked for a reason, and certainly not underrated.

let it be a lesson to ye: unless you pop the book's cherry on goodreads, it is likely not obscure.

[Metopheles]

Last attempt :

Don't fool me, unless you google him, you never ever heard of Imre Madach and his Az ember tragedijia, The Tragedy Of Man. It's a very old book and out of print, you can't even find decent used old ones. I got a shitty paperback (love hardcover) of it, but the text is at least a reprint of a library book.

An other question, anyone know stories about book collecting and rare books ? Like Ninth Gate / Club Dumas. Cause it's kinda useless to ask google for "Book about book collecting / film about book". I feel so terrible typing this in google, knowing beforehand that it wont spit out what I wanna know :(

[Jiriki]

Dafuq?

per 'Peake studies': 1968–69: the three Titus books republished in hardback and paperback (as

Penguin Modern Classics); they have remained in print ever since, regularly selling thousands of copies a year.

That's, um, a really large, colorful font, in your original post there. And it's a nice quote, but it doesn't refute the statement that I made that several Peake works have been out of print for a very long time. What I said was that Peake's "Boy In Darkness" was out of print in the United States for 50 years. (It might actually be longer than that). There are, in fact, a number of Peake works that were out of print in the States for many years,link but "Boy in Darkness" is distinct in that it's a Gormenghast work. Published in the US in 1956 in a corrupt novella form, I'm not sure it's ever been released in the US since. A very nice stand-alone British version is available from Peter Owen Publishers, and this version uses the corrected manuscript.

But you were asking for a source for my statement that "During Peake's lifetime, his wasn't a highly successful writer. In fact, Gormenghast and Titus Alone were scorned in critical circles, and both books were remaindered after failing to sell many copies. And Peake himself was unable to complete his series. Not that there was much interest in another book that wouldn't sell well, anyway."

I realize that a peer-reviewed source from a well-respected publication might not be as good as content partially copied and pasted from the first Google hit for Mervyn Peake, set in a very large font and then highlighted, but here you go:

Watney, John (1990). "Introduction to Titus Awakes" The Mervyn Peake Review 23.

When Titus Groan was published in book-hungry Britain at the end of March 1946, it was generally well received — with reservations. Mervyn Peake was already known as a poet and illustrator; many reviewers compared his novel with his previous work, and found it less successful. For the novelist Howard Spring, Titus Groan was 'full of the macabre power that makes Mr. Peake's drawings notable. But [he] has not yet learned how to apply this power effectively to the writing of fiction (Country Life, December 6, 1946, p. 1108). The anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement expressed similar reservations[...]

Placing Titus Groan in a category remains a problem, which explains the ambivalence of many of the reviews. Much depended on the reviewers' attitudes towards the 'grotesque', the 'fantastic', and the 'Gothic'. A few like Kate O'Brien, were openly dismissive: bad, tautological prose ... a large, haphazard, Gothic mess (Spectator, no. 176, March 29, 1946, pp. 332 & 334); others, like the celebrated novelist and short-story writer, Elizabeth Bowers (already quoted above), were more enthusiastic: Titus Groan defies classification: it certainly is not a novel; it would be found strong meat as a fairy-tale. Let us call it a sport of literature (for literature I, for one, do find it to be) — one of those works of pure, violent, self-sufficient imagination that are from time to time thrown out.'

On balance, the reviewers were largely positive, with some lengthy eulogies in major periodicals. [...]

When it came to the publication of Titus Groan in America, Peake was dismayed to find that the publisher had added the subtitle, 'A Gothic novel' to the cover and title-page of the book; this inevitably colored the reviews. Titus Groan came out late in 1946 after a flourish of advance publicity, as in the New York Herald Tribune: 'Just as we were struggling with William Blake by Mark Schorer, Will Cuppy came in and asked out of a clear sky: "What is that new novel about a character named Ug or Awk, but not by Vardis Fisher?" We knew right away he meant Titus Groane [sic] by Mervyn Peake' (September 1, 1946).

It left many reviewers puzzled, and they sought in vain for a meaning in the work: 'He would be a brave man indeed who offhand would attempt to determine the meaning of the story,' commented John Cournos, beating a retreat in the New York Sun (November 5, 1946). 'An allegory it may well be. But of what?' wondered Orville Prescott in the New York Times (November 8, 1946); he felt that the 'dark jewels of Titus Groan are buried deep and must be dug for through masses of slag and dirt: Thomas Sugrue was equally perturbed by it: 'Perhaps Titus Groan is meant to represent a dream. Perhaps it is surrealistic. Perhaps it is just a dull book, without humor, without vitality, yet tumbling on for a dreadfully long time' (New York Herald Tribune, November 24, 1946). The New Yorker concluded that 'readers who look for hidden meanings may find themselves wondering whether Mr. Peake has done anything more solemn than produce a work of extraordinary imagination while having himself a very fine time' (November 16, 1946).

Difficulties of classification again proved a handicap to success, and praise was often overshadowed by such comments as 'it is almost impossible to classify' (Call Bulletin, San Francisco, December 7, 1946), and 'a flight of allegorical fantasy that defies classification' (Beloit News, Wisconsin, December 5, 1946, repeated in the Burbank, California, Review, January 8, 1947).

Overall, however, American reviewers were quite as favorable as the British. 'With all its defects,' concluded Hermes Nye in the Dallas, Texas, Times Herald, 'this remains a book for the man who relishes the fantastic, the puckish and the beautiful' (December 8, 1946). Writers again proved to be Peake's most sympathetic readers. August Derleth informed subscribers to the Milwaukee Journal that 'this novel offers rich reward to anyone who exercises the patience and imagination to stay with it' (November 17, 1946), and the celebrated novelist Robertson Davies, writing in the Peterborough (Canada) Examiner as Samuel Marchbanks, concluded: 'it is an astonishing work of art — It has been condemned as unhealthy and absurd, but in my opinion it is neither, but a very fine book, well removed from the beaten path of contemporary fiction. I recommend it highly' (December 10, 1947).

During the three following years, Peake lived on the Channel Island of Sark; there he completed Gormenghast which was published in September 1950 to critical acclaim. [...] But there was no American edition of Gormenghast until 1967.

During the 1950s, Peake found it increasingly difficult to maintain his position as an author and illustrator. On the one hand, his style and sense of humor were increasingly at variance with the spirit of the age, which led to the relative failure of his light-hearted novel, Mr. Pye, in 1953, and the complete flop of his verse play, The Wit to Woo, staged briefly at the Arts Theatre Club in 1957. On the other hand, his health was declining to the point where he could no longer hold his pen or enunciate his words clearly; whether it was Parkinson's disease or (as a contemporary doctor put it with brutal brevity to Peake's wife, Maeve) 'premature senility', it was to render him unable to work by the early 60s and kill him before the end of the decade.

His publisher encouraged him by commissioning his novella about Titus, "Boy in Darkness", for a volume called Sometime, Never, which contained stories by William Golding and John Wyndham. Published in 1956, it later became a successful paperback, winning a Nebula Award, and drawing welcome attention to Peake's work. But that was in the 1960s.

In 1958, Maeve assembled a version of Titus Alone from Peake's various manuscript drafts and submitted it for publication. [...] When the book was published at the end of October 1959, the reviewers' praise was qualified with terms that damned it at the same time, and sales were poor indeed- 'The remarkable thing is that so intensely subjective an experience can be communicated at all. Even when one is confused by the private symbols, one accepts their reality for the author, and re-reading may give one deeper understanding' (John Davenport in The Observer, November 1, 1959). 'Mr. Peake must be allowed a monstrous fertility of invention, a genuine feeling for the magnificence of the macabre, but the air of Gormenghast and the surrounding country is difficult to breathe' (The Times Weekly Review, November 5, 1959, p. 10). [...]

During the last decade of his life, Peake continued to write, but his texts were disconnected and his handwriting almost illegible. From these years two fragments have been salvaged: his attempts at a fourth Titus book, reproduced here (pages 347-352) under Maeve's title, 'Titus Awakes', and the story of Foot-Fruit and his dog, of which three manuscript pages were reproduced in New World (No. 187, February 1969), alongside fiction by J.G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon, John T. Sladek, Norman Spinrad, and D.M. Thomas.

[...]Then in the mid-60s came the meteoric rise to popularity of Tolkien's three-volume Lord of the Rings, and suddenly fantasy literature was back in favor. In 1967, a new American publisher, Weybright & Talley, hoping they had found another instant cult classic, brought out a fine uniform edition of Peake's Titus books, enriched with sketches from the manuscripts, and called it 'the Gormenghast trilogy'. The reception was decidedly mixed, largely because of the explicit comparisons the publishers made with Tolkien — and admirers of the one are not necessarily admirers of the other; in fact, 'they are night and day' (H.A.K. in the Boston Globe, November 19, 1967). Stephen J. Laut, S.J., set the tone in Best Sellers (November 1, 1967, p. 305) by calling the books 'a quasi-chivalric adventure' in a 'pseudo-medieval setting.' 'Could the whole thing simply be a gigantic put-on?' he wondered, and unearthed all the negative phrases from the American reviews of Titus Groan, including his favorite, 'baroque nonsense.' All because 'Peake is no Tolkien, nor a T.H. White, nor even a Malory.' He was echoed by 'a long and very sad groan' from Dick Adler in Book World, January 7, 1968 (p. 4), and by: 'maybe it just wasn't our hogshead of tea' from Aurora Gardner Simms (in the Library Journal, December 1, 1967, pp. 4434-5), for she found it 'dreadfully long and slow.'

A three-volume paperback edition came out from Ballantine on October 28, 1968, less than a month before Peake's death. Compared with the reactions to the hardback edition, the reviews were harsh: Publishers' Weekly was 'too overcome by ennui to discover just what this trilogy was to be all about' (September 16, 1968, p. 72), and Robert Armstrong decided that 'anyone who is left on the edge of his chair after finishing a chapter or book has a posture problem' (Minneapolis Tribune, October 27, 1968). Yet this edition remained in print throughout the 1970s.

In Britain, the publication of new, illustrated, hardback editions of the Titus books was spaced over several years: while Titus Groan (with the introduction by Anthony Burgess printed in this Overlook edition) and Gormenghast came out in January and December 1968, Titus Alone did not appear until June 1970. They were welcomed with diminishing praise, starting with Paul Green's review in the New Statesman: "Titus Groan... is a magnificent exception to any literary pigeon-holing... Underneath the superficially farcical and grotesque aspects of the novel there is a pagan grandeur and sense of desolation which is as meaningful as any allegorical or sociological interpretation' (January 26, 1968, pp. 114-15). And on the same day, Henry Tube ended his long review in the Spectator with the conclusion that we must see Peake, the writer and illustrator, 'not as a man with two talents, but as a genius with two nibs' (pp. 105-6). On February 15, Hilary Spurling devoted much of her 850-word review in the Financial Times to an extended comparison with Kafka: 'what is interesting is that Peake and Kafka use such similar, often identical, means for exactly opposite ends.'

Without the help of an Introduction by Burgess, Gormenghast met with more tepid praise, along with some frankly hostile comments, like Oswald Blakeston's outburst in Books & Bookmen: 'I can't see any real reason for critics to inflate this whole castle which is already too big for its boots' (February 1969, p. 14). Even R.G.G. Price found himself tempering his previous judgments: 'The trilogy is a freak, though a brilliant one, not a great novel.... On the other hand, it is more than a somber jeu d'esprit' (Punch, January 1, 1969).

The second British edition of Titus Alone introduced a new version of the text put together by Langdon Jones. He reinstated passages from the manuscripts that had been dropped from the first edition; they 'principally affect Chapters 24 (an entirely new episode), 77, 89, and from Chapters 99 to the end where the original published text has been considerably built up' [...] Simultaneous with the hardback editions, paperback editions were brought out in Britain by Penguin in their series of Modern Classics and, despite the absence of really favorable reviews, they have fulfilled Elizabeth Bowen's hopes by remaining available in Britain in paperback ever since. The only change came with the King Penguin (U.K) editions of 1980-81, for which I provided limited corrections (see 'Editing Peake' in The Mervyn Peake Review, No. 13, Autumn 1981, pp. 2-7) all subsequent editions, including this one from Overlook, follow these amended texts. And I should point out that this edition of Titus Alone is the first independent appearance in the United States of the text revised by Langdon Jones. It also appeared in Overlook's omnibus edition of the Titus books in July 1988.

But ya, on this one you seem to be way off. You kind of have a track record for that.

Hmmm. The only times I remember arguing with you were twice when you were oddly claiming that you knew what books I'd read; you claimed that I hadn't read Donaldson, in response to one of my first posts on this board. Then you made a similar weird statement later. You... you don't still believe you know better than me what I've read, do you? I guess I don't know what to say to that. It's... it's weird.

let it be a lesson to ye: unless you pop the book's cherry on goodreads, it is likely not obscure.

But the topic was "overlooked or underrated writers", not obscure books/writers. There's a big difference between underrated and obscure.

Sometimes, people are from different countries and there these authors are unknown, or, authors are classics or praised, but are not widely read or known except by some critics.

Indeed. Some authors are wildly popular in one place, but their books are out of print elsewhere. I recently learned that Guy Gavriel Kay's books were out of print in Germany (they might still be).

[Darth Richard II]

Having a book out of print doesnt make you overlooked or underrated. Maybe that specfic work is, but that's not the topic we're discussing. Fuck, some of the History of Middle Earth books are out of print now, but I don't see anyone claiming(yet, god help us all) that Tolkien is underrated/overlooked.

Peake, ffs.....

[Jiriki]

Having a book out of print doesnt make you overlooked or underrated. Maybe that specfic work is, but that's not the topic we're discussing. Fuck, some of the History of Middle Earth books are out of print now, but I don't see anyone claiming(yet, god help us all) that Tolkien is underrated/overlooked.

It's not a book, there are multiple Peake books and stories that are out of print.

Which History of Middle-earth books are out of print? LOTR.com says they're all in print. They may be currently out of print in hardcover.

[Darth Richard II]

So? His Gormenghast collection is in every major book store I've ever been it. There is someone on this board named after the damn thing. He is NOT AN OVERLOOKED OR UNDERRATED author, no matter how much you want it to be so.