6 Great Novels that Were Hated in Their Time
Raise your hand if you ever had to read a classic novel in school, only to come away hating it. And keep your hand up if at some point an adult turned up their nose at you for failing to recognize genius when you saw it.
Well, here's their dirty little secret: Many, if not most, of the books you were handed in high school as required reading were hated by critics and readers alike when they first hit shelves.
#6.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Story You Know:
It's Aldous Huxley's chilling 1932 tale about a future centered upon sex, drug, and assembly-line worship, depicting humanity caught in an endless cycle of buying gizmos, working trivial jobs and taking drugs to make the depression go away.
Unfortunately, its main characters do not look this awesome.
How Poorly it Was Received:
Critical reaction to Brave New World was "largely chilly," which is the short way of saying that it did to the literary world what Willy Wonka's boat ride did to your childhood.
Gaze into the face of madness.
The result was an outright panic of literary criticism which resulted in the book getting universally panned, and ultimately selling only a few thousand copies upon its release in the U.S. Why? Everybody hated Huxley's vision of the future.
Even fellow futurists like H.G. Wells were shocked by the book's dystopian landscape. Despite being the same man who wrote War of the Worlds, Wells describe Brave New World's bleak future as "a betrayal." As for the book's more forgettable critics, i.e. everyone else, responses ranged from dismissal to childish name-calling.
Sources tell us that Mr. Huxley has cooties.
After all, he's talking about a future where mankind is pacified, not by a totalitarian dictator, but by infinite distractions, trivial entertainment and bullshit? Ridiculous!
Preposterous!
However, it can truly be said that Aldous Huxley got the last laugh. Brave New World has gone on to become one of the most celebrated and influential works of the 20th century, and its author one of the most equally respected/creepy intellectuals on the planet. After redeeming both his and his World State's reputation, Huxley died on November 22, 1963--the same date as C.S. Lewis and the Kennedy assassination--just so he could mess with us one last time.
Thirty-seven years later, he would be awarded the ultimate achievement for a work of literature: having an Iron Maiden album named after it.
#5.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Story You Know:
The definitive American story about the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and how hard life sucks if you're anyone in a Henry Fonda movie.
Henry Fonda.
Also, there's a famous scene in the story where a young woman breastfeeds a dying old man, which we're totally not going to make fun of because it's seriously that beautiful.
How Poorly it Was Received:
Imagine if Inglourious Basterds was released in 1929. Something like that.
"A new talkie from Q. J. Tarantino."
Despite boasting what was clearly the classiest case for lactivism since Ancient Rome died, The Grapes of Wrath received less than a warm welcome when it was released.
Since "Fuck the Poor" had pretty much been America's policy all the way from the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, Steinbeck's devastating depictions of American poverty, plight and migrant camps came off as "depressing" to most readers, and by depressing we mean part of a communist/socialist conspiracy.
Get off our streets you Red Commie bastard!
The Grapes of Wrath was denounced as a "pack of lies" and "a libel" from both the left and right wing of the political spectrum. The book was censored, banned and even burned in towns across the United States including Steinbeck's own hometown.
Note how they couldn't afford gas or even matches
because they were seriously that fucking poor.
Despite the treatment The Grapes of Wrath received, Steinbeck eventually benefited from the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, filmmaker John Ford and reality, once people found out that most of the book was based on true events. In fact, Steinbeck had actually downplayed the horrific conditions of the Dust Bowl--which included an explosion in black widow and tarantula populations...
As evidenced by David Arquette's unflinchingly accurate Dust Bowl docudrama.
...because he was more interested in telling a story than scaring the nation into a communist frenzy.
Sure enough, the book ended up becoming really important and helped Steinbeck win the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, which at the time actually kind of meant something.
#4.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Story You Know:
It's what you get if you combine the first season of Survivor, Swiss Family Robinson and Saw. Also, for extra fun, the whole book starred children.
Something tells us it's a good thing there were no girls on the island.
How Poorly it Was Received:
William Golding's brilliant work of social commentary and symbolism was a complete commercial failure when it was released, but the truth is Golding was lucky that the book even made it that far. More than 20 publishers passed on the Lord of the Flies, no doubt due to the "excessive violence and bad language" Golding smacked his audience with like a blackjack upside the head.
Literature!
The book sold less than 3,000 copies before going out of print in the 50s. In other words, there's probably a hobo making copies of his manifesto on the Xerox machine at a public library who has sold more copies. We can't imagine why. After all, the book was just showing a complete collapse of faith, philosophy and society. With children.
This also happened.
However, in what we notice had become a trend in 20th century literature The Lord of the Flies, despite its unpopularity, had all the workings of a Nobel Prize winner. The book was eventually reprinted, assigned in classrooms throughout the United States and Golding was dubbed a Nobel Prize Laureate, then a freaking knight.
Though, he probably wasn't invited to speak at any Boy Scout ceremonies.
So keep that in mind should your first dabble in science-fiction/fantasy not go over so well when you post it on your LiveJournal. You're just a few years from a Nobel Prize in Literature, so start planning now what to do with your millions of dollars and your new knighthood, baby!
Nice timing with the Twilight book cover.
ReplyLord of the Rings was boring as hell. It's just a kid with big feet going on a journey of unnecessary length. Holden in Catcher reminds me way too much of Bella in Twilight just because they love to complain.
ReplyI loved The Lord of The Flies. I found it repulsive and terrible, and that's probably why it' so brilliant.
ReplyI think "Catcher In The Rye" is way too overrated and dull like "Ethan Fromme" and "A Separate Peace". I'm more of a "The Road", "East of Eden", "Speaker For The Dead" kind of guy...
ReplyHerman Melville was a good friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne's (one of my faves), but Hawthorne was a bit too self-centered as a human being to reciprocate friendliness back to Melville.
Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" was also very poorly recieved, and didn't get any notice until after she had passed away (from what I've imagined was a broken heart), and her sister wrote "Jane Eyre".
The best stories are the ones we don't want to hear or face the first time until we catch a small glimmer of beauty of the gem hiding inside the coal.
f**k wuthering heights! all that book is snotty rich people being rude and screwing each other over (and not in the fun way)! It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia comes to mind, except less boring.
IMHO, Catcher in the Rye gets more credit than it deserves. It's just a whiny kid complaining about how much other people suck. Holden is basically the first literary hipster.
ReplyAlso, Moby Dick has its awesome moments, but they're spaced between terribly boring chapters that describe whaling ships in detail and have almost nothing to to do with the actual story.
They even had one chapter about masturbation. I believe the chapter was titled "A slip of the hand."
take that lesser nerds! Led Zeppelin and the Lord of the Rings all the way!!!!
ReplyTo be fair, Lord of the Flies terrified me as a child, and Grapes of Wrath and Catcher in the Rye are boring as shit.
ReplyI didn't appreciate GoW until a few weeks after I'd finished it. It's one of those stories that just haunts you after you've made it through.
Grapes of Wrath was really good, but yea, Catcher in the Rye is just plain s****y and a sad excuse of literature. Wait, that s**t is literature?
"Evanstar"
ReplyOH GOD MY SIDES
I think J.D. Salinger has some awesome short stories and I really like his writing style in them, even though his short stories always have an odd,nihilistic punch line. I did not like Catcher in the Rye though. It probably would have been better had it been written from a 3rd person point of view.
ReplyCatcher in the Rye is interesting because it presents a different view of the world in the 1950s, when society really wanted to censor all of its problems. The thing is that people realize that the 50s weren't all that great anyway and people wishing for the good ol' days is just that: wishful thinking.
I have always hated Catcher in The Rye. I read it because it is considered a classic and i thought I should at least give it a try. (Plus I heard many infamous killers had the book in their collection so I thought there must be something to that)I thought it was boring and arrogant. I don't know why so many people think this is so good, or such a revalation of a generation. There are plenty of other works that can convey the same message without making you want to throw the book across the room. Sociopathic, narcissistic, self indulgent and completely f*****g boring.
ReplyThe thing with Lord of the Flies is that at the time, it was completely unbelievable. Who could imagine that their children, or any children for that matter, could become murdering saveges. Then society caught up with the book.
ReplyNow we live in a time where fifth graders deal crack during recess and 7 year olds rob each other at knifepoint. What the f**k happened?
Yeah, because violence in kids is new.
I just finished reading Lord of the Flies, and I couldn't stand it. In Canada they make you read it in grade 10, and it was horrible. I didn't find it disturbing, but boring and unrealistic. Golding writes very pretentiously, which makes reading it a chore. For the first 8 chapters, nothing very exciting happens, and I spent pages and pages waiting for the huge meltdown, that didn't happen. I also found it very confusing in the way the story progresses. Oh well, at least that's over and done with.
ReplyI hated almost every book they made me read in school, then, after re-reading them just for the sake of reading, i could appreciate them.
Kids simply don't like being forced to do stuff.
Does anyone actually understand what's so controversial about Catcher in the Rye? Honestly when I read the novel I couldn't see why.
ReplyMost of the "controversial" material was just shocking by 50's standards: Holden swearing like a sailor, acting all alienated, hypercritical of society and generally emo, the underaged drinking and whoring, the bit with the ambiguously gay teacher...
Little of that would raise an eyebrow in a post-millenial reader. It's called "values dissonance".
"Thirty-seven years later, he would be awarded the ultimate achievement for a work of literature: having an Iron Maiden album named after it."
ReplyThat makes it all worth it.
Most of these books were hated because they were controversial, not because they were bad. You should expect that great works are often controversial and avant-garde, so I think the title was sort of misleading.
ReplyPeople don't remember 100 year old books that were bad. Especially if people thought they were bad to begin with.
If this was a list about books that were hated in their time, had no literary value and are still considered poorly today, this would be a list of very obscure books that no one has read in a long, long time. What the f**k were you expecting?
I attempted to read The Lord Of The Rings. Sure the story was fine in itself, but as a lot of critics pointed out Tolkien was not a very good writer. His style just failed to draw me into the story itself. And if I had to put up with those f*****g Hobbits singing one more time I would have flipped my shit.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesI'm currently having the same experience with H.P Lovecraft's At The Mountains Of Madness. I do not see the necessity behind explaining the geological processes that formed said mountains and how various animals became fossilized.
His style actually has a lot in common w/ the writing style of classical epics, which is kind of the point, since it is an epic. Sure, it's not always the best writing style, but it was an intentional choice rather than simply not being a good writer.
Re: Lovecraft, though, I will agree on the bad writing, although I object more to his repeated description of essentially anything meant to be horrific as "cyclopean".....
Shad, "cyclopean" means "really enormous", in fact so big it would take a Cyclops ( a mythical race of one-eyed giants) to lift it. It has nothing to do with anything being horrific.
I feel like these writing styles are an acquired taste, like whiskey, death metal, or a fine cigar. I couldn't stand Tolkien's writing at first, but by the end of the series I just wanted more.
Yeah, LOTR reads like an Epic, for better or worse. If you don't like things like the Odyssey (Which has awesome monsters but can still be long and tedious) you probably won't like LOTR.
...except because it's Lovecraft, half the time the fact of it being cyclopean is *enough* in his mind to justify its supposed horrific status without any further explanation. Same goes for many other things (except most of those are "blasphemous" instead).
His characters also seem to have the incredible ability to continue being shocked by the same object or event for hundreds of pages on end.
Seriously, I love The Catcher in the Rye. Guess I'm just a sucker for a whiny b***h
ReplyThe problem with books that are hailed as literary masterpieces is that they place too much emphasis on the symbolism or criticism of humanity/politics without taking the time to make the story interesting. This is why I'd rather read a book that gives me insight into how the author views the world. H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, or even TV writers like Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry will always be more appealing to me because they can write symbolically while maintaining a good story.
ReplyI'm sorry, but Moby Dick is one of the most boring, ridiculous pieces of allegorical crap ever shat out by a wonderful author. When you get to the actual substance of the book, i.e. the whale and the symbolism surrounding it, those parts are f*****g masterpieces. Unfortunately, all that stuff is hidden in between hundreds of pages of godawful crap about what ships look like, none of which is important to the ridiculously amazing actual story of the novel.
ReplySeriously, those parts are great, but the book suffers as a whole because of how long-winded Melville was at that point in his career. If he'd kept it to the length of Typee (one of his early works), it would have been a lot less stupid and migraine-inducing.
Ok, Catcher In the goddamn rye is the worst book ive ever read. Holden Colfield is a whiney bitch, the like to rival any charachter played by hayden christiensen
ReplyI understand that you don't like the book- but don't EVER compare ANYTHING to Anakin Skywalker, Episodes 2-3. You just... you just don't do that. It's like calling your mom Hitler because she grounded you. Catcher in the Rye does not make me cringe and feel umcomfortable while reading it. I could probably reread it and be fine.
The third movie acting is just PAINFUL.
I totally agree. It's downright painful to have a discussion about this book with anyone. They all have the same stupid sparknotes interpretation of Holden as this visionary and intellectual. It's infuriating. If you met someone like that in real life, you wouldn't praise them for their insights, you'd tell them to get a f*****g grip and stop complaining lol.