The arbitrariness of fame

The title of this post is intended to spur general discussion of the topic. Some examples off the top of my head, also fairly arbitrary:

The Great Gatsby

Although it might actually win a poll today for what is the great American novel, it didn’t sell when it was published, and was largely forgotten at the time of Fitzgerald’s death in 1940. The key event here is that somebody decided to issue copies of it to GIs in Europe during WWII, which led to a huge revival both in terms of sales and critical acclaim.

. . . thanks to a reader for sending along this fantastic story about exactly how this happened (key word: “Princeton”)

A Confederacy of Dunces

The only reason this novel was ever published is because Walker Percy reluctantly kept reading the slush pile submission to the LSU press by the author’s mother eleven years after her son’s death.

Eva Cassidy

A complete unknown outside of Baltimore Washington DC musical circles at the time of her death, she almost certainly would have remained that way if a BBC disc jockey hadn’t decided to start playing her music as part of his very popular program.

Nick Drake

Rescued from total obscurity by the fact that Island Records didn’t delete the box set of his music it published in 1979, even though it didn’t sell at all initially. The box set was released initially because of the efforts of an NME critic, and it was the vehicle by which all sorts of musicians discovered him in the 1980s, leading eventually to popular fame via Napster and then YouTube etc.

The Lord of the Rings

This one is trickier, but I gather than LOTR had a pretty smallish cult following for a decade after its publication, and became a massive cultural event because it went viral via an illicit paperback publication that took off on US college campuses in the mid-1960s. By the late 1960s it was everywhere, including in the lyrics of Led Zeppelin’s second album.

There are of course countless other examples. A couple of germane quotes from Nassim Taleb:

Consider the thousands of writers now completely vanished from consciousness: their record did not enter analyses. We do not see the tons of rejected manuscripts because these have never been published, or the profile of actors who never won an audition-therefore [we] cannot analyze their attributes. To understand successes, the study of traits in failure must be present … Any form of analysis of [success and failure] that does not take into account the silent initial population becomes close [to] pure verbiage.

People who fail do not seem to write memoirs… Readers would not pay$26.95 for a story of failure, even if you convinced them it had more useful tricks than a story of success. The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, etc. Just like the population of millionaires.

The relevance of all this to the concept of meritocracy should be obvious but it isn’t because of the meritocracy (ironic).

. . . Searching for Sugar Man is an amazing story along these lines.

I missed something that has to be mentioned in this context: Mark Burnett picking Trump to star in The Apprentice. Delete that event and Trump is just a bit of 1980s trivia today.