No one in the High Literati has considered PKD a "real writer" just a "pulp" one. Even the NYT piece states that. He did in fact struggle to pay his bills because I am familiar with bits of his bio. "Neglect" can cover a wide range of areas- yes he was published, so he was lucky in that way but as for the literary opinion of him, he wasn't taken seriously (like Bradbury or Clarke) because sci-fi writers generally aren't. (LeGuin even complains of this). It's sort of like Hitchcock- he wasn't taken seriously as a filmmaker until someone like Truffaut championed his work. Then they (the critics) began to listen.
PKD was not as neglected as Hurston was, and certainly not as much as Emanuel, who has only had very small presses publish his poems yet deserves a reputation in a league with Langston Hughes. But again, there are different degrees of "Neglect."
In my post, I say that I used this angle to speak about this elitist attitude in the snobby literary world. It was more of an attack on that attitude rather than me championing PKD's actual work. Perhaps I could have made that more clear in my original blog post, but I assume those reading it know I'm not the type to give a fiddler's fart about what the general public thinks. If something is good, it’s good whether it’s sci-fi or not.
But then there are those who worship everything certain writers have written, (like Joyce or Woolf) simply because of their reputation. The fact that PKD’s book will be published by The Library of America is the establishment’s ‘thumbs up’ in saying, ‘hey this guy is for real.’ And that was the point to the post. Whether I agree or not is beside the point.
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Re: Philip K. Dick
Date: 2007-05-07 06:09 pm (UTC)PKD was not as neglected as Hurston was, and certainly not as much as Emanuel, who has only had very small presses publish his poems yet deserves a reputation in a league with Langston Hughes. But again, there are different degrees of "Neglect."
In my post, I say that I used this angle to speak about this elitist attitude in the snobby literary world. It was more of an attack on that attitude rather than me championing PKD's actual work. Perhaps I could have made that more clear in my original blog post, but I assume those reading it know I'm not the type to give a fiddler's fart about what the general public thinks. If something is good, it’s good whether it’s sci-fi or not.
But then there are those who worship everything certain writers have written, (like Joyce or Woolf) simply because of their reputation. The fact that PKD’s book will be published by The Library of America is the establishment’s ‘thumbs up’ in saying, ‘hey this guy is for real.’ And that was the point to the post. Whether I agree or not is beside the point.