Writers No One Reads

Highlighting forgotten, neglected, abandoned, forsaken, unrecognized, unacknowledged, overshadowed, out-of-fashion, under-translated writers. Has no one read your books? You are in good company.

Brought to you by

50 Watts (WS)
Invisible Stories (SS)
(un)justly (un)read (JS)

Disclaimer

These writers are famous in some part of the internet or the world. Some may be famous in your own family or in your own mind. ("In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people..." Momus)

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No one reads Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who asks in his poem “Dream-Pedlary”:

If there were dreams to sell/ What would you buy?

and whose obscurity perplexed Lytton Strachey, who wrote:

If the neglect suffered by Beddoes’ poetry may be accounted for in more ways than one, it is not easy to understand why more curiosity has never been aroused by the circumstances of his life. For one reader who cares to concern himself with the intrinsic merit of a piece of writing there are a thousand who are ready to explore with eager sympathy the history of the writer; and all that we know of both the life and character of Beddoes possesses those very qualities of peculiarity, mystery and adventure which are so dear to the hearts of subscribers to circulating libraries.

For more on Beddoes’ peculiar, mysterious and adventurous life, see John Ashbery’s lecture on the poet in Other Traditions.

(Image: first stanza of “Lord Alcohol”)