Trollheart

If you push it back another hundred years or less it's got to be Dickens. I can see Shakespeare, sure, but how many people actually read any of his plays? With Dickens you have still millions of readers, to say nothing of adaptations on TV and in movies, so I think Dickens is still in the public eye over 150 years after his death.

Unfortunately, though I like much of his work, I feel it may be King, as most people seem to think he wrote everything including the Bible.

Then again, the way things are going, who knows if anyone will even still read, or need to, in 100 years, never mind a thousand?

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ando here

Shakespeare remains mandatory school reading. Almost anyone who considers themselves in the most remote sense well read has a copy of Shakespeare on the shelf. Most importantly, people are still doing his plays. Take him out of schools and stop all productions of his work then I might consider Dickens above The Bard - in the English speaking world, strictly.

By King do you mean Stephen King (and dear God, I hope not)? I'm hoping you mean The King James Bible as it remains the best selling book every year worldwide. Compared to that every other author or collaboration of authors are a distant second and below.

Why wouldn't people need to read? I don't see us on the path where a surplus of intelligence or empathy precludes it. Unless, of course, you mean we'll be back to clubbing each other and retreating to caves, though it's not clear we've ever stopped doing that.

Trollheart

I do mean Stephen King. I like his writing, sure, but I hear too many people who seem to think he's the only writer that ever existed. I mean, I literally heard someone on a quiz show asked who wrote - something, can't remember, but obviously could not have been him - and the answer she gave was Stephen King.

I truly hope people continue to read, but think about it: even now I regularly meet people who "aren't bothered reading". When I say this, I should clarify that I guess I mean reading books - everyone reads on the internet of course, or on their phones. I've heard people say "I wouldn't read anything I wasn't forced to in school." This attitude is not, by any means, the majority but it is growing, and the idea of "why would you read?" is gaining too much traction for my liking.

I also wonder where we might be (if still extant) in a thousand years? Look how far we've come technologically in just a hundred. Might we not evolve, no longer need our eyes, ears, mouths and just assimilate information like computers? Maybe not, but there's no real reason to suppose than in another thousand years we would still be reading, that English or any of our languages would survive, that we wouldn't all be telepathic etc. Just ideas.

I'd put Shakespeare and Dickens kind of on the one level really - with the Bard the one the academics read and Dickens the one people read for enjoyment. I've tried reading Shakespeare and found it very tough going, and I'm an okay reader. The language has not aged well and you kind of need both a dictionary and a history book beside you when reading, to get all the nuances and understand what he's talking about. Most of us, unless studying, or very dedicated, don't have that kind of commitment.

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Lisnaholic

Interesting that Homer Simpson has been everybody's first thought about this thread, and makes me wonder if the collected scripts of The Simpsons will not be our Iliad.

The Iliad was a poem, probably started life as a spoken recitation, which is my excuse for suggesting that old fave of mine, Bob Dylan as a candidate for our Homer. His collected lyrics constitute quite a compendium of 20th century styles and subjects and in the post-apocalyptic world in which nobody reads books anymore, we can gather round the bonfires and recite Dylan songs, in a scene that would be familiar to those old Greeks...

The original poll to this thread misses its target a bit: although it has 14 options, six of those options haven't won a single vote, and it conspicuously lacks a "None of the Above" option, which to judge from the posts here, would probably rival S King as the winner.

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Trollheart

It's a sad but somewhat funny fact that were you to ask a hundred random people what the name Homer meant to them, at least ninety of them would say Homer Simpson...

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ando here

Ah, but that's a very different question loaded with different assumptions. A question about Homer on GoodReads.com would hardly yield that dismal identification percentage rate.

Lisnaholic made a good point about the role of poetry when evaluating the influence of a writer (though I can't concur about the broader influence of Dylan Thomas). Shakespeare was certainly a poet, and in fact, if people were to pick up any of his works on the fly today, it would more than likely be his collection of sonnets. Many of the writers in the poll list have admitted to being initiated into the world of writing with hearing poetry at a young age. Baldwin, who I was watching last night on a YouTube clip, admitted to being in the profession of "poets". That's, of course, the larger/historical sense of the word. But poetry's chief delights are aural, not written, which is why the best Shakespeare experience, for example, is in watching/listening to him. Can't say that about Henry James (one of my favorites) unless you've got an especially talented reciter delivering his lines which, in any case, are from a novel, which has different objectives than the poem in terms of reception.

Trollheart

You know, I think it might. Pop culture has kind of taken over everything now. I remember in work someone was talking about Marc Anthony, and some girl quipped "Oh is he the one married to - can't remember, might be Whitney Houston but probably not?" Point being, for a certain slice of the population, something is only worth thinking about if it's relevant. To them and their time.
Yeah I'm a Coleridge man myself.

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ando here

These are not people who read books. I assumed that was the audience.

Btw, Marc Anthony sounds similar but is not quite the historical figure, Marc Antony. Anthony is a salsa/pop singer married to Jennifer Lopez. How the two are confused will remain one of the mysteries.

Trollheart

Jennifer Lopez. Yeah. That was the one. I understand that, but it was an oral question so no spelling involved. Just annoys me that the first thing someone would think of when they hear that is not the Roman Empire and Cleopatra but some pop singer. Ah well. I did once hear someone say they were "as orange as Hitler". Still trying to work that one out!

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Lisnaholic

She was in a movie called Roman Empire as well? I must check that out.

I sympathise with you and ando, lamenting the way that historical figures like Homer get supplanted by a new guy with the same name. I was annoyed, for example, when a movie about a dog co-opted the name Beethoven. Of all the names available, it seemed an unnecessary, even disrespectful, one to choose.
On the other hand, people are interested in what they find interesting, and who are we to lecture people about knowing about a bunch of old guys? I've enjoyed hours of Homer Simpson's antics on tv, but only got through a couple of pages of The Odyssey, so, for me, as for most people today, Homer = Homer Simpson.
As Andy Warhol said "Everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes". To be fair, Mark Antony has already had a lot more than his 15 minutes; he's been hogging the carousel of fame for way too long, so should we really begrudge Marc Antony his 15-minute turn?

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953