This question has come up a lot for me over the many years I've persued writing as a career. Early on, I thought about what was 'serious writing' versus commercial fiction as I contemplated whether or not to have a pen name. This was seriously encouraged for those wanting to write real literature after making a living writing romances or mysteries. One of my favorite professors in grad school had a pen name writing mysteries that supported his family far more nicely than his 'serious ficiton.' He was so ashamed of the mysteries that his students did not find out his pen name even after he died (I still look).
Grad school fermented my hostility at the notion that serious lit and lit for the masses were from hugely different classes. If I learned nothing from my studies of the greats in English lit was that whether they were deemed serious and worthy of study or pop culture depended a lot on who was looking at the works and why. Many greats fell in and out of fashion in academia over generations. My pack of professors did not seem to think that skill in storytelling made for a great writer. Don't ask me why, but playing with words and tenses and points of view was the thing -- not conveying an understandable plot. This same crew thought Toni Morrison was not a suitable subject for my PhD a year before she won the Nobel Prize. My view of college professors is decidely sideways.
Then one night, I found myself drinking cheep beer by the pitcher with William Goldman (oscar winning screenplay writer and author of ‘The Princess Bride’ and ‘Marathon Man’, two fine novels). He was speaking at our grad school because his daughter was a student there. Here is this man who had achieved everything that I was dreaming of achieving and he was fretting that his works would not be remembered by critics or professors once he was gone. And there I was already very grateful that someone else was buying the drinks and snacks explaining that Charles Dickens wrote the equivalent of soap operas in his days. His stories were meant for the masses to follow easily and were cheap enough that one could be purchased and read aloud to a group. Dickens could have easily written ‘Desperate Housewives.’ Though my example at the time was probably ‘Dynasty.’
This all comes back to me now as Jon and I are exploring well studied authors for our film projects. These writers are on every reading list from junior high to graduate school. There is no doubt in my mind why they are studied. Their use of language is elegance and grace and wit. But they have all fallen out of fashion at one point or another due to improper content (Oscar Wilde) or that their writing was deemed as merely thinly disguised reportage (Hemingway and Fitzgerald).
That is true for all three writers. It’s also true for ‘Peyton Place.’ I believe that all deserve attention in the history of fiction. Writing stories that can transcend all the class and culture differences of a mass audience and strike a cord that resonates and enthralls is a talent that should never be thought of as minor. To find a niche readership that is avid and loyal is not a small feat. I take the artist and the devotee of pop culture or even smut equally seriously. Each has a venerable place on my bookshelf and on my publisher’s list.
