Well, first of all, Draug, I'd argue Poe, Orwell, and Dickens at least are all "high-brow enough" to count...and if you count Virginia Woolf as snooty or pretentious, than what about J.R.R. "Look at me showing off my Anglo-Saxon knowledge" Tolkien?

Besides, I got Woolf into the Elite 8...that's not bad...better than a lot of people.

Also, one of my four was D.H. "BOY Do I Love to Fuck!" Lawrence...

Not exactly the most pretentious guy ever. :p

"Dickens and Poe didn't write for the upper classes. Dickens wrote for the masses and Poe was a drunken orphan who had trouble holding onto jobs and was only paid $9 for the populist "The Raven". Orwell wrote against the upper classes.

So which is snooty or even highbrow?"

Case by case:

--Poe liked to include everything from Latin to twists on classical or Romantic imagery in his poems and stories...Latin doesn't equal highbrow, just a bit? (Or are you telling me the local ditch digger and bartenders were Latin masters?)

--Orwell liked to reference history and other works of Lit in his works, and got pretty damn political...

--Dickens did write for the masses, but so did Shakespeare, and the reason both were so good is they knew how to write high AND lowbrow stuff...

Dickens could put in some lowbrow jokes from Sam Weller or Pegotty, and Shakespeare could make a dick joke or a vagina joke or Anything Regarding Sex Ever joke...

But in the same plays as he does that, Shakespeare has scenes like "To be or not to be," and Dickens has Sidney Carton basically sacrificing himself a la Christ.

Good writers don't IGNORE the highbrow stuff...

They just know how to make it accessible...and fun. :)

"They just know how to make it accessible...and fun."
Which is usually why they're not actually considered highbrow at all. Accessibility? Hrrrumph!

dickens.

Sometimes I get the impression that "snooty and highbrow" just means "written before I was born" or "written more than a century ago," depending on who you're talking to.

Their calling Tolkien "highbrow" and I was very much alive when the trilogy was published.

They're... Damn it.

Dickens 9
Woolf 3

Draugnar, the "I" in "before I was born" is supposed to be the person accusing something of being highbrow. Not everyone here was alive in the 50s.

And besides, Draug:

1. It's indisputable that Tolkien was himself about as highbrow as it gets, linguist and friend of C.S. Lewis and other such literary luminaries that he was, and

2. The reputation of an author or book can change over time...

D.H. Lawrence was viewed as everything from a talented and notable writer to a pornographer and sex fiend at the time of his death in 1930

He picked up steam in subsequent decades...

He took a big leap forward when "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was published unexpurgated in the 1960s...

He took a big hit when Second Wave Feminism decried a lot of his works in the 1970s...

And today he's somewhere in the middle of all that.

If Lawrence can go from pornographer to bold author to sexually-liberated to sexist to a canonized author and somewhere between all those extremes today...

Isn't it possible the One Fantasy Series to Rule Them All might take on a reputation as being deep and "highbrow?" (Again, when they were written by the author with the biggest hard-on for Old English in history?) :)

Highbrow =/= deep. LotR is deep. But it isn't trying to male some social statement like Les Miserables or Oliver Twist. It was influenced by (as can be seen in the change in tone) Tolkien's experience in the war, but was not intended to male social statements are make people.aware. Hell, The Hobbit was written for his kids. So it has depth of character and a deep back story but was not intended to provoke deep thoughts or social awareness. College kids read it (and Junior High and High School) I'm the states for fun, not like Steinbeck or Hemingway which were forced upon us all initially.

"but was not intended to male social statements are make people.aware. Hell, The Hobbit was written for his kids."

1. I can think of a LOT of kids books that make social statements, and

2. I highly dispute that Tolkien isn't trying to make some social statements...mostly because it's practically impossible to write anything of meaning and NOT have something to say about society and how we live and the choices we make and good and evil and what those mean and all that good stuff.

However broad or repackaged it is, it IS a commentary on life...

It's not a commentary on the World Wars--Tolkien himself hated that analysis of his work--but it is a commentary nonetheless.

And while I don't like the way great authors are introduced to students--frankly, if your reaction to them is to remember them as just being "forced" on you, then you had a bad teacher, good literature should almost never be a chore, that's why it's GOOD literature, it's supposed to be engaging...these guys and gals sold millions of copies and entered the mainstream and got James Dean's career going for a REASON--I would say that, if we're using the term...

Well, sometimes parents have to force their kids to eat their veggies rather than just snack on Snickers all day long (not to correlate Tolkien with mere candy or Hemingway/Steinbeck with dull vegetable platters specifically.)

But again, often times, at least one of the parents will be able to find a way to make those healthy foods work for their kids and make it tasty.

Some good food just tastes like shit, and some good authors are just dull--

"Hooray, Brussel Sprouts and Nathaniel Hawthorne!" said no kid OR adult ever. ;)

But "The Grapes of Wrath" was a very popular movie when it came out...
Ditto "East of Eden"...
Gary Cooper and Ingrid "All I Do is Scream" Bergman in "For Whom the Bell Tolls"...
A shit-ton of Shakespeare adaptations for film and TV...
A popular-as-hell musical adaptation of Les Mis (the movie was very blah, C-, could've been a B if the direction was better and Russell Crowe didn't sing)
And so on.

Those are all examples of "highbrow" or "literary" authors crossing over into the mainstream AND becoming popular and enjoyable in the process via mediums and people that help make an intro to the material accessible.

And that's the point--those books and authors DESERVE to be accessed, and we benefit from their being accessed, that's why they've survived the test of time.

Tolkein 1
Dumas 0

Tolkien*

Tolkien

tolkien

TOLKIENII
DUMASERRORLANGUAGEDOESNTSUPPORTZEROINTEGERS

TOLKIENIIi
DUMASERRORLANGUAGEDOESNTSUPPORTZEROINTEGERS

Alas, poor Woolf...oh well, she had a good run...and, of course, via Internet logic--

Everyone who voted against her is now a woman-hating sexist. ;)

Tolkien: 5 (I think, with my vote?)
Dumas: 0

Totally off-topic:

Started watching House of Cards...

Good, not as good as The West Wing--that still stands as the best show I've ever seen, and my favorite barring Trek or Doctor Who (it's probably tied with those three...maybe the early seasons of House as well, and Frasier rounds out that Top 5)...but very, very good, so I started watching the British version.

YES! ALL OF THE YES! SHAKESPEAREAN IAN RICHARDSON FOREVER! :D

And the actress that plays Mattie, the Zoe of the series?

Pfff, screw that--Zoe is the Mattie of the US version, and not even...

She's honestly the weak link in the US version for me...she's not BAD, she's alright, but she seems far too dependent and, from a writing standpoint, I think the writers are sometimes a bit exploitative with her, in the same way that the writers for "Sherlock" exploited the Irene Adler character and made her too dependent on Sherlock in the end and fell back on the old "woman using sex as a tool" trope, which seems tired and just an excuse for T&A.

Mattie's so much smarter, stronger, and somehow is able to achieve all that without the writers feeling she needs to flash Ian Richardson (though whether the great Ian Richardson would've minded is another matter.) ;)

Anyway, SHE'S far better...and I knew I'd seen her before, she's in the Jeremy Brett version of "The Dying Detective," and she was great in that! Damn, why hasn't she had more work, she deserves it!

BUT ALAS, BRITISH TV...ONLY 4 EPISODES!

12 if you count the followups...it isn't fair...

A bad US series gets 12 episodes easy, probably a few dozen more...

Only 12 episodes for a great show like this? Damn it, British TV, how could you??? :p

Tolkien I guess.

While I want Tolkien to win, I can't have zerousketeers.

Dumas

Tolkien 6
Dumas 1

I'm going to switch to Dumas. I really don't like Tolkien all that much, and I don't like this blowout.

Tolkien: 5
Dumas: 2

Tolkien, I hate that these two came up against each other.

Love them both, Tolkien is my clear favorite though.

Tolkien himself said that he wrote LOtR without social commentary. And who said it had meaning? Sometimes a book is just a good read.

Sure, the best books may be fun to read and have social commentary and this and that, but that doesn't mean that all good books have all of those ingredients. I think that a lot of good book do all of that and more, and do it well, but that doesn't mean that all good books do or have to.

And I've read a few preambles by authors who hate over-analyzing literature elites who have said that they deliberately stick in Christian allegories and other overdone literary devices in odd places in their work just to screw with them. They only want their books to be a good read and have a private laugh (with their more devoted fans decades after the fact) at those who try to put more than that into their work.

http://whitneycarter.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/the-curtains-were-blue.jpg

But what do the curtains themselves mean? Was he shuttering himself in?

+1 Chaqa

the thing is, chaqa, i found this good a few years ago as well. but in fact, if the author only wants to say that the curtains were blue, you're probably reading light fiction.

I think sometimes we over-analyze authors and artists. The Beatles wrote "I Am The Walrus" to mess with people who tried to analyze their songs. Not everything means something.