Author
LATRAME
@latrame
"Moby Dick" was a failure. Melville died believing he'd wasted his life as a writer. The book became a masterpiece thirty years after his death, when readers he never knew finally read it the way it needed to be read.
This isn't an exception. It's a pattern that runs through the whole history of literature. A text can arrive too early, say something its era isn't ready to hear, in a form it doesn't yet know how to read.
That doesn't mean every ignored text is a masterpiece ahead of its time ; that would be too easy, and false. But it does mean silence around your work isn't a verdict. A book's readership isn't always contemporary with its writing. Some appointments are made with readers who aren't born yet.
This isn't an exception. It's a pattern that runs through the whole history of literature. A text can arrive too early, say something its era isn't ready to hear, in a form it doesn't yet know how to read.
That doesn't mean every ignored text is a masterpiece ahead of its time ; that would be too easy, and false. But it does mean silence around your work isn't a verdict. A book's readership isn't always contemporary with its writing. Some appointments are made with readers who aren't born yet.