Pynchon's Interview

[Richard Romeo]

sorry, Mr. M--it wuz the Chicago Tribune (doper's memory, what can I say?) 
Rich

Copyright 2002 Chicago Tribune Company
Chicago Tribune


April 21, 2002 Sunday, CHICAGOLAND FINAL EDITION

SECTION: Arts & Entertainment; Pg. 1; ZONE: C

LENGTH: 1805 words

HEADLINE: Why authors get HOT;
How do yesterday's has-beens become today's must-haves?;
Even literature is a popularity contest.

BYLINE: Julia Keller, Tribune cultural critic.

BODY:
When Jackson Benson was an earnest young graduate student in the late 1960s, 
he decided to focus his scholarly work on novelist John Steinbeck and his 
simple, powerful stories about the quiet dignity of the dispossessed.

Yet the very tales that so moved him, Benson said, only moved his colleagues 
to snickers. Steinbeck was regarded by most as a low-rent scribbler of 
sentimental hogwash, a literary lightweight. "If you were going to try to 
work in academia and go on to an important career," Benson recalled 
ruefully, "I was told, 'You shouldn't write about Steinbeck.' "

Some three decades later, however, Steinbeck is sizzling hot. Walk into 
virtually any large bookstore and behold the thick new reprint of Benson's 
1984 Steinbeck biography with its luscious chocolate-brown cover; the 
first-ever compilation of Steinbeck's journalism, "America and Americans and 
Selected Nonfiction," and nifty new editions of his major novels featuring 
handsome woodcuts on the cover.

snip

Even writers who are regarded as almost sacred, as having ascended to a 
pantheon untouched by petty subjectivity -- William Shakespeare, John 
Milton, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway 
-- all have had their time in the sun and in the shadow, sometimes 
celebrated and other times ignored, even rewritten.

The forces at work

While there are specific reasons why certain authors' reputations rise and 
fall at particular historical moments -- an anniversary, a biography, a film 
-- more mysterious, ineffable forces also are at work. All of the publicity 
in the world can't make an author interesting if her or his work doesn't 
resonate with readers; by the same token, some authors rise out of nowhere 
by the sheer power of their words.

On the flip side, once-lauded writers who seem to be on the downhill slope 
include T.S. Eliot and Thomas Pynchon. Eliot, who died in 1965, presumably 
is long past worrying about his reputation, but Pynchon might take solace in 
recollecting that in the 18th Century, Shakespeare's talents were regarded 
as so negligible that other writers routinely spruced up his plays.

snip



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