I only kept a record of books I had read for a year or so in 1987-88. Phil gave me a journal and I wrote them all down. It is truly a list of forgotten writers-many of them were hot stuff at that time.
Whatever happened to Margaret Drabble, Alison Lurie, Lee Smith, Thomas Williams, Peter Taylor, Doris Grumbach, Jane Smiley, Charles Dickinson, Mary Gordon, Gail Godwin, Marge Piercy, A.S. Byatt. Pat Barker. Does anyone read these writers now. These are all so called "literary" writers. There many who are gone but not forgotten: Pat Conroy, Alison Lurie, Sue Grafton, Truman Capote, But do the genre writers survive any better? My list of 20 mysteries I read that year seem more familiar. And, of course, a lot of writers are still around Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman etc.
Who doesn't deserve to be forgotten?
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