Attached Link: http://hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2003-09-21.shtml

If you hadn't heard, Stephen King has been awarded a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Award. Naturally, critics are up in arms because King doesn't write "literature." Something I'd always found amusing is that today's greats were yesterday's hacks. The classic writers we're forced to read in school today were derided in their own time because they wrote "common" stories instead of literary masterpieces. Orson Scott Card, a famous Sci-Fi writer, summed up the irony nicely: "Hardly anyone reads the "great writers" of the Elizabethan era, and instead we honor most a playwright who wrote to win the pennies of the shopkeepers and apprentices. Whom do we remember and read most from the 1800s, not in English classes, but for our own pleasure? Charles Dickens, who wrote serials for the newspapers. Louisa Mae Alcott, who started with dime novels and ended with children's fiction. Mark Twain, whose books were sold by subscription and who was despised as a hack until the French noticed him. Jane Austen, a "mere" writer of women's books. King will be remembered when all the writers favored by his disparagers are forgotten. It is King who will teach our grandchildren what America was in our time. The hilarious thing is that most of King's critics would probably praise Edgar Allan Poe as an important American writer -- even though his most noted work is definitely in the oogly-boogly category. He's been dead long enough for the stink of popularity to have faded, apparently. " BTW: Mr. Card has a great website filled with interesting columns, including a sporadic one on writing. He has also written one of the best books on writing I've ever read, "Characters and Viewpoint." So the next time someone tells you that you're wasting your time by "writing genre" instead of literature, just remember, 100 years from now kids will probably be studying Stephen King and JK Rowling, not the "intellectual literature" that today's professors drool over. Maybe they'll be reading your "genre stuff" as well. Cheers!