Besides Ayn Rand, who are other authors who continue to be extremely popular after their death?
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josie (
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May 14th, 2013
Thirty years after her death, Ayn Rand is still selling a lot of books. Ayn Rand sold 1,000,000 copies of all of her titles in 2012.
Atlas Shrugged sold 359,105 copies in 2012, its third highest total of all time, behind 2009 (#1) and 2011 (#2).
Atlas Shrugged was a bestseller in Rand’s day, but it’s selling more than ever in the 2010s. Annual purchases of Atlas Shrugged by decade averaged:
1980s — 74,300 per year
1990s — 95,300 per year
2000s — 167,028 per year
2010s — 303,523 per year
To date Rand’s books have sold a total of 29,500,000 copies.
I know lots of people do not like Ayn Rand or her books. The question is not about that.
And certainly nobody reads Ayn Rand for her melifluous prose. Ayn Rand’s writing style is to reading as beef jerky is to chewing. The question is not about that either.
I am simply curious, as a point of comparison…Besides Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who are other authors who continue to draw a crowd in the millions long after their death.
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I don’t have time to do the research and check the latest sales figures but these are still hot items;
Shakespeare;
James Joyce
Cervantes
Moliere
Homer
Plato
Aristotle
Tolkien
Dr. Seuss
Tolkien died in 1973. He’s sold a few books since then… especially considering that the vast majority of his books weren’t published until after his death.
Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft have done considerably better in death than they had in life.
I was going to list something like @gailcalled‘s list, but since it’s already there, how about Sinclair Lewis, George Orwell, Kahlil Gibran, Aldous Huxley?
Let’s not forget Fitzgerald…
@ETpro: I will read almost everything but would never consider revisiting Sinclair Lewis. I do wonder whether people still read him.
As a rough guide to book popularity, I did a check of the ranks of a few books on Amazon. Atlas Shrugged comes in at a highly respectable 821.
The Great Gatsby comes in at #2. Only some of that can be due to the recent movie release.
1984 comes in just behind Atlas Shrugged at 824.
Here are some others I checked:
Where the Wild Things Are – 421
Brave New World – 1221
Road Less Traveled – 1280
On The Road – 1534
Lord of the Flies – 1617
Dickens
Austen
Tolstoy
Dostoyevsky
Salinger
Fitzgerald
Hemingway
Baldwin
Robert Jordan
The list is almost endless.
^^^Ooh, great list. (Other than Robert Jordan. Who’s he?)
@gailcalled Robert Jordan wrote a science fiction series “The Wheel of Time” and died before the last volumes which were finished by someone else. My son loved them.
Which leads us to:
Isaac Asimov
Ray Bradbury
Frank Herbert
H.G. Wells
Jules Verne
and on and on and on….
By the way, I know Dickens, and possibly Austen as well, has never been out of print. That says a lot.
I know Catherine Cookson retains a loyal following as do the Bronte sisters.
Nietzsche
(And as I’ve told you before, Rand sales are artificially inflated by TAS and ARI).
Most of them have already been mentioned above, but I’d like to add Stieg Larsson to the list (he authored the Millennium trilogy, which was published posthumously).
Anything that is required reading for high school and college.
^^^ Those used to be “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Catcher in the Rye.” Perhaps that has changed.
^^ Catcher in the Rye has an Amazon rank of 162. I wonder how much of that comes from being required reading.
One edition of Euclid’s Elements has an Amazon rank of about 12½ thousand. Considering the material (does not read like a novel), that is extraordinary.
J D Salinger. The Great Gatsby is cool and all, it’s my favorite book of all time. But to me Salinger paints himself a more vibrant yet dark character in Catcher in the Rye. He was part of no crowd.
I believe Christian F. Andersen’s stories are reincarnated by many authors so I’d have to say him. Plenty of fairytales.
The almost infinite number of authors who wrote, rewrote, translated, re-translated, interpreted and re-interpreted the holy works of every religion we have.
Some great one’s on here but no said
Vonnegut. Mary Shelley. Dorothy Parker was the first to pop into my mind but I know she’s just my personal fetish. Though there are DP fan sites I am not sure she has the numbers.
Louis L’Amour
Sun Tzu
Agatha Christie – I see @ucme beat me to her
Conan Doyle
Douglas Adams! No one has mentioned him yet!
@SavoirFaire
(And as I’ve told you before, Rand sales are artificially inflated by TAS and ARI)
Gosh. Thanks for reminding me. I guess I forgot.
Should I flag my own question?
@josie No need. Just a friendly reminder.
If we accept the fact that the Bible was written by God, then…
Also, see here.
@SavoirFaire
…Rand sales are artificially inflated by TAS and ARI.
What are TAS and ARI?
@Brian1946 The Atlas Society and the Ayn Rand Institute. Each organization purchases tens of thousands of copies of Atlas Shrugged and other Rand books every year and then attempts to distribute them. Sometimes they send the books to libraries for free, sometimes they resell them. Note that they count resold books as a second sale. One of my former colleagues is an Objectivist and works as part of this operation. He talks about it openly because he thinks it’s genius and in no way sees it as dishonest.
Alfred Hitchcock comes to mind.
Children’s authors, such as Antoine de Saint‑Exupéry, author of Le Petit Prince or The Little Prince, frequently seem to be popular over long periods of time.
Voltaire, Oscar Wilde, and Jonathan Swift are also all still popularly read in English classes. Sylvia Plath, as well.
If we are including poets, I would add Emily Dickinson, for some unfathomable reason.
^^^Saint‑Exupéry was so much more than a children’s author. His stories about flights across the Atlantic, Andes mountains, North African desert; his descriptions of the carnage during the Spanish Civil War, especially the afternoon street scene during a Madrid air raid immediately after a wedding with the groom wailing in shock over the mutilated body of his bride, are all unforgettable.
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