11 masterpieces by writers who are strangely underrated now

I like the great standards of the canon as much as anyone, but I think there’s also something to be said for reading lesser-known works. It keeps the lemming-like side of human nature at bay.

The great Christopher Morley put it more eloquently:

“Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of a unanimity.”

Luckily, I have a whole slew of lesser-known classics to recommend for you.

In this article, I’ll be focusing on lesser-known books by authors that you may have heard of, like Robert Penn Warren, Graham Greene, Jack London and Katherine Mansfield, as well as characteristic books by lesser-known authors like Lafcadio Hearn and Henri Murger.

Without any more ado, here we go!

Dorothy Sayers is now more well-known for her essays on education than for her novels, but that’s a pity. She’s a mystery writer with a literary bent and a talent for making the commonplace meaningful.

Gaudy Night is a great example of Sayers at her best. Nothing is cliché in this most cliché-dependent of genres. The ambivalence of the love affair between heroine Herriot Vane and Lord Peter Whimsey is representative; you feel like you should know how this goes, but the story always manages to wriggle away from the well-trod paths.

“How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.”

This novel shocked many when it was published, but its long-term impact was in its popularization of the bohemian lifestyles of the artists and painters of the Left Bank.

Author Henri Murger’s style is loose and playful, and while there isn’t a lot of plot to speak of, I dare you to read this without wanting to fly to Paris and begin living in a garret, while painting and ingesting copious amounts of liqueurs. The atmosphere is intoxicating and it’s no wonder that it hugely influenced the artistic culture not only of Paris, but really the entire world.

Not to mention, it’s hilarious. The soul of Mark Twain with the accent of Pepe Le Pew.

John O’Hara wrote 35 books that sold over 40 million copies. 5 of his works have been turned into major motion pictures. But he’s largely unknown today. (Except perhaps as the man over whose head Ernest Hemingway broke John Steinbeck’s blackthorn stick)

That’s a shame because O’Hara was great. At his best, he was Fitzgerald and Hemingway, with a little bit of Dashiell Hammett. And Appointment in Samarra is universally regarded as one of his finest books. It’s very Gatsby, very Prohibition-era, stylish in a tragic kind of way.

And at times, it’s profound: