“It isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention,” The New York Times pronounced concerning Nabokov’s Lolita.

“Kind of monotonous,” the same paper said about Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. “He should’ve cut out a lot about these jerks and all at that crumby school.”

“An absurd story,” announced The Saturday Review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, while the New York Herald Tribune declared it “a book of the season only.”

That said, for all the snooty pans of books now considered classics, there have been, conversely, plenty of authors who were once revered as literary miracles and are now relegated to the trash heap. Sir Walter Scott, for example, was considered perhaps the pre-eminent writer of his time. Now his work, reverential as it is to concepts of rank and chivalry, seems fairly ridiculous. Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War blockbuster, Gone with the Wind, won the Pulitzer and inspired comparisons to Tolstoy, Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. Now it’s considered a schmaltzy relic read by teenage girls, if anyone.

For many best-selling authors, it’s not enough to sell millions of books; they want respectability too. Stephen King, despite his wild commercial success, has nursed a lifelong gripe that he’s been overlooked by the literary-critical establishment. In 2003, King was given a medal by the National Book Foundation for his “distinguished contribution to American letters.” In his acceptance speech, he took the opportunity to chide all the fancy pants in the room—“What do you think? You get social academic Brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?”—and to ask why they made it “a point of pride” never to have read anything by such best-selling authors as John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and Mary Higgins Clark. Harold Bloom, the most finicky of finicky literary critics, went into a tizzy, calling the foundation’s decision to give the award to King “another low in the process of dumbing down our cultural life” and the recipient “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.”

Bloom’s fussing had little impact. King was already on his way to the modern canon—his essays and short stories had been published in The New Yorker—and thus he was now in the position to announce who he thought was garbage: James Patterson. “I don’t like him,” King said after accepting a lifetime-achievement award from the Canadian Booksellers Association in 2007. “I don’t respect his books, because every one is the same.” To which Patterson later replied, “Doesn’t make too much sense. I’m a good dad, a nice husband. My only crime is I’ve sold millions of books.”

War of Words

In the long war over membership in the pantheon of literary greatness, no battle had quite the comical swagger of the ambush of Tom Wolfe after the publication of his 1998 novel, A Man in Full, which became a call to arms for three literary lions: Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving. As the English newspaper The Guardian gleefully reported, they were adamant that Wolfe belonged not in the canon but on airport-bookstore shelves (between Danielle Steel and Susan Powter’s Stop the Insanity). Updike, in his New Yorker review, concluded that A Man in Full “still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form.” Mailer, writing in The New York Review of Books, compared reading the novel to having sex with a 300-pound woman: “Once she gets on top it’s all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.” (Mailer and Wolfe had a history: Mailer had once remarked, “There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York,” to which Wolfe replied, “The lead dog is the one they always try to bite in the ass.”) Irving said that reading A Man in Full “is like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine. It makes you wince.” He added that on any given page out of Wolfe he could “read a sentence that would make me gag.” Wolfe later struck back. “It’s a wonderful tantrum,” he said. “A Man in Full panicked [Irving] the same way it frightened John Updike and Norman. Frightened them. Panicked them.” Updike and Mailer were “two old piles of bones.” As for Irving, “Irving is a great admirer of Dickens. But what writer does he see now constantly compared to Dickens? Not John Irving, but Tom Wolfe . . . It must gnaw at him terribly.”