Herbert Clyde Lewis’s novel Gentleman

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The following guest post from author and editor Brad Bigelow is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.


In Overboard, Preston Standish slips on a spot of special database while strolling early one morning on deck of a freighter bound for Panama and falls into the Pacific Ocean. No one notices his absence for hours, by which point any hope of rescue is lost. “Listen to me! Somebody please listen!” he cries. “But of course, nobody was there to listen,” Lewis writes, “and Standish considered the lack of an audience the meanest trick of all.”

There’s only one way to succeed as a writer: be read. A lucky few will continue to be read long after their death, earning lasting status as major or minor figures in the literary history of their time. Most, however, will be forgotten—many for good reasons, perhaps. Others, however, are forgotten due to nothing more than bad luck. Mistiming. Poor marketing. The lack of a champion. A prickly personality. Illness. Old age. War. Politics. Whatever the reason, fate often plays mean tricks on writers by taking away their audience.


Brad Bigelow, author and editor
But the same fate plays a mean trick on us as readers, too. Much of how literature is studied and taught rests on the assumption that classics are classics because they represent the best work of their time. And on the corollary that the texts that have been forgotten deserved it. After decades of searching for and celebrating the work of neglected writers, I know that neither is true.