Successful Novelists Ignored by the Manhattan Literary World

Isaac Asimov complained that none of his books were ever reviewed in The New Yorker, even though, as a well-known writer, he had been mentioned in the magazine many times. The reason: he was not taken seriously as a novelist because most of his writing was science fiction. Wallace Stegner, a brilliant novelist and nonfiction writer who lived in and wrote about the American West, was never reviewed in the New York Times even though his novels, Angle of Repose (1971) and Spectator Bird (l976), won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award respectively. Why did the Times ignore Wallace Stegner? He was not part of the Manhattan literary scene.

Jim Fisher