Justin Hampton at The Bookloft

Jeez, it’s something about storied authors of the 20th century and their titles. First, it’s near-centenarian J.D. Salinger successfully fighting off (for now) a sequel to Catcher In The Rye, and now it’s a Florida Courts judge ruling the will which bequeathed Keroac’s $20 million estate to his wife a forgery.

Book twitterers have been RTing the latter for a bit now, which says something to me: titles which kicked off the counterculture and made it safe for authors to dispense with “fug” in their writings still have a tremendous hold on the bookreading public. We can talk all we want about emergent technology and how digital entrepreneurs are reshaping the industry, but the danger is in ignoring what makes people respond to art in the first place. Even people I know who don’t read – and there’s a LOT more of them who don’t than do – know Salinger and Keroac because they evoke a mythology that people want to get close to. It’s a mythology the readers helped to create alongside the authors.

Ceding that authority over our culture to the Big Boys has accounted a great deal towards the cultural malaise that shadows American literature. Millions of readers nationwide taking their marching orders and reading recommendations from Oprah and Target don’t really seem to bode well for the sorts of grassroots movements that buoyed the careers of the Beats. But I think it’s merely a matter of misplaced focus. I’m pretty sure if people looked towards their communities instead of their big-box malls for guidance, they’d be pleasantly surprised by what they found. It’s only by seeing what’s available in the present that we can refrain from endlessly cannibalizing the past in court.