Are many classics authors only considered great because literacy

>>9013352
Shakespeare
Hemingway
Joyce
Kafka
Pynchon
Homer
Hesiod
Dante
Gaddis
Calvino
Borges
Gass
Dostoyevsky
Kleist
Gogol
Tolstoy
Faulkner
Dante
Marlowe
Marvell
Proust
Carlyle
Keats
Byron
Shelley
Flaubert
Dickens
Moses
etc.

>>9013367
so basically everyone before David Foster Wallace was only successful because illiteracy was so rampant in their times that any book written was considered a classic?

>>9013412
Oh yes, I forgot

David Foster Wallace
Thank you, but yes, everyone before and including his time

>>9013416
So Stephen King is the only legitimate great author?

>>9013419
Yes. This is correct.

>>9013352
>>9013367
If that were true, why would these same authors still be considered great now when literacy is the norm?

>>9013352
I would say literacy is scarcer nowadays.

>>9013807
I'd say depth of literacy. A lot more people are basically literate, but fewer of the literate have a wide vocabulary and a deep comprehension.

>>9013352

No, the reason they are considered classics is that they have survived while their competition has been forgotten. If you do a little deeper reading you can discover contemporaries to a lot of authors that were praised at the time but then dropped off the literary map either due to irrelevance or being one-upped or whatever. A good example I can think of is Willkie Collins, who was incredibly popular around the time of Dickens but is virtually unknown to the lay man today.

There was way more writing in the past than people like to believe, it's just that it's all forgotten due to being mediocre or lost in the zeitgeist.

It's kind of the same phenomenon as saying that "music used to be so much better in the old days." If by this you mean that the "good music" of yesteryear is better than the "good music" of today you may well be justified. But if you mean that the overall quality was higher you are likely wrong. There is a ton of crap that has been rightfully forgotten, making it seem like everything that came out was already "a classic."