A List of Forgotten Authors

Rediscovering forgotten authors is a favorite pastime of mine, and it's been a while since I made a good list.

Earlier this year I read The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler, a book with a wonderful concept that didn’t quite live up to its promise for me. It was largely because Fowler’s tastes simply diverge pretty widely from mine. Whatever their respective literary merits, what many of the authors he chose to feature seemed to have in common—both as a reason for their original notoriety, and Fowler's choice to spotlight them—is how weird, bizarre, risque, or transgressive their books were. (I'm sorry, I don't belong to the school of criticism that can call a book both "disgusting" and "brilliant" and not see any contradiction.) Even the profiles on the handful of authors whom I've personally read and enjoyed seemed to focus on the most offbeat or edgy aspect of their work possible.

You can read my review on Goodreads for a few more specific details on my reactions to the book, but suffice it to say that I didn’t come away with a list of new authors I was eager to try, which I’d expected or hoped might be the case. You see, I’ve been one for discovering, loving, and eagerly waving around recommendations for forgotten authors practically my whole adult life. I think it started when I got my first Kindle and began to frolic in the public domain. I was practically the target audience for Fowler’s book.

Well, even if it didn’t turn out quite that way, I did come away with the urge to make my own updated list of forgotten authors worth rediscovering. Not my first—twelve (!) years ago I wrote a blog post listing ten favorite forgotten authors I’d found by that point. But with twelve more years of reading under my belt, the list is much longer and varied now.

My criteria for including an author on the list is more informal that Fowler’s—I believe he had some specific parameters relating to an author’s books being out of print, and some of these (notably the mystery writers) have had reissues in recent years, at least in ebook form. I’ve simply picked authors who are no longer household names, or not as critically acclaimed or remembered as their contemporaries.

The list isn’t in any strict order, but the first dozen or so names are the real shining standouts for me personally:

• Elizabeth Daly

• Eugene Manlove Rhodes

• Booth Tarkington

• B.M. Bower

• Frank H. Spearman

• Melville Davisson Post

• Kathleen Thompson Norris

• Angela Thirkell

• Eloise Jarvis McGraw

• Bess Streeter Aldrich

• Mary Roberts Rinehart

• Hammond Innes

• Ianthe Jerrold

• Francis Marion Crawford

• Ethel Lina White

• Charles King

• Anna Katharine Green

• D.E. Stevenson

• Grace S. Richmond

• Ernest K. Gann

• Christopher Morley

• O. Douglas (Anna Buchan)

• Geraldine Bonner

• Margery Sharp

• A.M. Chisholm

• J.S. Fletcher

I would also include Christina Gowans Whyte, if having read only one single book by a given author and loving it (none of her other books are available online) qualifies her for inclusion. (Whyte is so completely forgotten that the only fact the internet has to offer about her is that she was born in Scotland.) I also debated adding Frances Noyes Hart, having read two of her books, loved one and been exasperated as all get-out by the other.

How familiar or forgotten are these names to you? Who would be on your list?

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