The last time this debate dominated American letters was the 1930s, when the Depression at home and the rise of fascism in Europe led most literary people to positions on the left. The question that divided them was whether political virtue meant writing about and for “the people” — as followers of the Popular Front, a Communist-inspired coalition of left groups, believed — or whether the most radical and progressive work was necessarily too difficult for mass consumption. The critic Lionel Trilling complained about the average liberal’s assumption that “wit, and flexibility of mind, and perception, and knowledge were to be equated with aristocracy and political reaction, while dullness and stupidity must naturally suggest a virtuous democracy.”

The truth is, however, that few writers ever make a conscious choice between elitism and populism, difficulty and accessibility. Writers write as their minds and fates compel them to: Virginia Woolf could not have written a populist epic like “The Grapes of Wrath” any more than John Steinbeck could have written a modernist study like “To the Lighthouse.” The same holds true for writers who are classed as nonliterary, authors of genre best sellers. I would wager that even the most commercial writers seldom produce work cynically, according to a formula. Rather, they write as they can and must, and their talent happens to be of a kind that produces best sellers.

The difference between elitism and populism might better be understood as a difference in a writer’s attitude toward time. A popular writer is one at home with the conventions and expectations of his moment, which is why his work is immediately understandable to many readers. But for that very reason, his popularity is likely to be short-lived: When was the last time you saw someone reading “Christy,” by Catherine Marshall, or “The Eighth Day,” by Thornton Wilder, both top-10 best sellers from 50 years ago? (Of course, there are exceptions: Another best seller of 1967 was “The Chosen,” by Chaim Potok, which remains a durable part of the high school canon.)

An “elitist” writer, on the other hand, is not one who desires only a small audience — few writers have any interest in turning readers away. Rather, she is one whose vision of the world and style of expression are defamiliarizing, who does not reproduce the world in words but transforms it. This kind of writer appeals to relatively few contemporaries, because she isn’t giving them what they are used to. But she is more likely to appeal to readers over time, as people learn her new way of seeing and recognize that it is another expression of the truth. The same thing happens in all artistic genres: Think of how the Impressionists went from scandal to dorm-room poster in the course of a century.

In this sense, an “elite” writer tends to be ahead of his time, a scout for posterity. This is the sense you get reading, for example, Roberto Bolaño, whose novel “2666” has the forbidding strangeness of genius. To read Bolaño you have to learn how to think and see like Bolaño. This takes a kind of talent — a talent for reading, which is more common than the talent for writing, but still the possession of a minority.