Outta Da Ballpark
The term “masterpiece” gets bandied about a lot.
It’s come to mean the crème de la crème, the ne plus ultra of any creative soul, but the reality is it’s the benchmark that determines if you’re good enough to be considered a master.
In short, not the best, but better than anything you’ve done before.
In contemporary parlance, however, it means something universally recognized and acknowledged as the best of the best.
We can argue about how we define “best” but when we look at writers (and we’ll focus solely on novelists this time out), we can judge their output by their batting average.
In other words, how many times did they swing, and how many times did they score?
Like baseball, it’s possible to:
Swing and miss
Swing and hit but not get on base
Swing and hit a single / double / triple
Swing and hit a home run.
We’re going to focus just on the home runs (i.e., their best known works, the ones readers around the world instantly recognize to this day when you mention the title) and only those published in their lifetime (more than a few had completed manuscripts in the hopper when they died).
And I’m not interested in doubles or triples, as praiseworthy as they are. Nope, only clear cut outta-da-ballpark hits here, nothing less
Jane Austen
Lifetime at bats: 4 books
One home run:
Pride And Prejudice
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Lifetime at bats: 6 books
One home run:
Frankenstein
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Lifetime at bats: 17 books
One home run:
The Scarlet Letter
Charles Dickens
Lifetime at bats: 22 books
Four home runs:
A Christmas Carol
Oliver Twist
Great Expectations
A Tale Of Two Cities
Herman Melville
Lifetime at bats: 11 books
One home run:
Moby Dick
Alexandre Dumas
Lifetime at bats: 48 books
Two home runs:
The Three Musketeers
The Count Of Monte Cristo
Victor Hugo
Lifetime at bats: 11 books
Two home runs:
The Hunchback Of Notre Dame
Les Miserables
Jules Verne
Lifetime at bats: 54 books
Four home runs:
Journey To The Center Of The Earth
From The Earth To The Moon +
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
Around The World In 80 Days
+ now typically published as one volume
with its sequel All Around The Moon
Mark Twain
Lifetime at bats: 41 books
Two home runs:
The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn
Booth Tarkington
Lifetime at bats: 40 books
Zero home runs
H.G. Wells
Lifetime at bats: 51 books
Three home runs:
The Time Machine
The War Of The Worlds
The Invisible Man
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Lifetime at bats: 71 books
One home run:
Tarzan Of The Apes
Ernest Hemingway
Lifetime at bats: 9 books
Three home runs:
The Sun Also Rise
A Farewell To Arms
For Whom The Bell Tolls
John Steinbeck
Lifetime at bats: 27 books
Three home runs:
Of Mice And Men
The Grapes Of Wrath
East Of Eden
Jack Kerouac
Lifetime at bats: 14 books
One home run:
On The Road
Joseph Heller
Lifetimes at bat: 6 books
One home run:
Catch-22
Ray Bradbury
Lifetime at bats: 11 books +
Two home runs:
The Martian Chronicles
Fahrenheit 451
+ counting only novels,
not short story collections
For those asking “Where are Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan-Doyle and Ian Fleming and Harlan Ellison?” the answer is they either wrote mostly short stories and no novels of lasting consequence, or they wrote series fiction, not standalone works, and while everyone knows who their series’ characters are, most people would be hard pressed to name a single novel from those series unless they had been filmed as mega-hit movies (Hound Of The Baskervilles excepted).
Burroughs gets mentioned because Tarzan Of The Apes is a fairly well written for an artefact of its era. He wrote several series of books, his pattern being to turn in two or three engrossing first volumes then, once on the hook for that $weet $weet $weet $equel $erie$ ca$h, started slumming out the follow-ups. Burroughs could write well when he put his mind to it, and his best later fiction are those rare occasions when he chose to indulge in wickedly insightful self-parody.
And for those wondering “Hoodafuq is Booth Tarkington?” the answer is one of the most famous, important, and influential American writers of the early to mid-20th century, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and a popular dramatist as well as a novelist. Several of his works were adapted into motion pictures, the most famous being The Magnificent Ambersons as directed by Orson Welles. He’s on the list because despite his popularity and prestige in his lifetime, he and his works are virtually forgotten today.
There’s a reason for that, and one that ties in with why everybody else has at least one home run masterpiece to their credit:
“It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.” – Alan Moore
Before we proceed, let me state I deny no one their pleasure, I yuck no one else’s yum.* There’s certainly a place and purpose for popular entertainment, and since I’m the guy who read Lester Dent’s Doc Savage novel The Sargasso Ogre at least 20 times during my 13th summer, I’d be a hypocrite to say you can’t enjoy your favorite forms of pop culture.
And art can be gleefully entertaining, it’s not confined to somber despair laden tragedy and tsuris.
But art always possesses what Robert Hughes called “the shock of the new.” It makes us see and experience things we’ve never seen nor experienced before. Even when it’s a joyous celebration, it’s a celebration that’s fresh and insightful. Even when it’s set in a previous era, or a well known contemporary setting, it catches us by surprise.
Tarkington, a masterful writer, specialized in nostalgia. His works reject modernity not the way Burroughs gleefully rejected modernity with Tarzan, but rather turned his back on the present and condemned the future sight unseen.
Nothing he wrote surprises us.
It pleases us, and that’s nice and certainly worthy of praise…
…but it’s nothing we’re going to remember for long.
© Buzz Dixon
* Unless you enjoy harming children, animals, and innocent people, in which case f.u.
