Where Have All the Great Writers Gone?

Armando Simon has written an interesting column at New English Review in which he asks why the west is no longer producing great literature. He focuses primarily on the United States but also includes England in his analysis. Here's his lede:

Something very, very odd is going on in our culture: the quality of literature appears to be fast declining. Whereas, before now, the United States could boast of a whole constellation of living first-rate writers, nowadays the number of excellent writers can be counted in the fingers of one’s hand—and those writers are on their last legs.

Nor can we take any consolation in thinking that the same phenomena may be at work that has been seen in the case of music and art, wherein geniuses have been overlooked, only to be discovered and appreciated later (e.g., Melville, Schubert, Van Gogh, Renoir). If anything, innovative, or controversial, writers, such as Joyce, were read and discussed while they lived and wrote.

Nor, again, can we take comfort in the attitude that has prevailed in Western society within the past three or four decades that, “there is nothing good, nor bad, only opinion” (with its corollary, “there is no right, or wrong, only opinion”), which has been an excuse for the proliferation of truly abysmal “art” by self-important, neurotic, talentless mediocrities.

Simon goes on to divide American history into fifty year increments starting with 1800 and then lists all the great American fiction writers who achieved their greatest work during each increment. When he does so he finds a fascinating result. The pattern that emerges is a bell-shaped curve peaking in the 1901-1950 increment and fading to near zero in the present era.

The same pattern appears if the same analysis is applied to British writers. Simon concludes that "Good literature is flatlining" and offers a couple of possible explanations for this phenomenon, some of which seem anodyne and some of which are more worrisome. Here's an example of each:

Wherefore this decline in great writers? It may very well be that the ravenous film and television industries have absorbed them. It has to be admitted that many television series and specials, and the cinema, have been superb (just as most others have also been mediocre, as in literature and art) and one cannot but wonder if those same screenwriters would not have written excellent fiction.

More troubling is the possibility that the bell-shaped distribution of great writers is an instance of a characteristic of intellectual endeavor in general. Simon cites technological discovery as an example:

In modern times, scientific innovations of a technological nature have surprisingly followed an identical bell curve pattern (telegraph, radio, television, cars, tanks, machine guns, rubber, steam engine, refrigerators, nuclear reactors, light bulbs, trains, cameras, rockets, airplanes, computers, etc.).

All subsequent innovations in our time have simply been constant refinements on those crucial, nascent inventions.

He offers more possibilities in his article which is relatively brief and which should definitely interest anyone who cares about literature.