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As a matter of fact, many sources can give you a sense of how the race for renown stands these days, at least in the academic world. As the members of SHARP-L rapidly made clear, however, these sources are not easy to interpret. The Institute for Scientific Information, for example, publishes the well-known and influential Science Citation Index. This counts the number of times particular articles (and their authors) are cited in other scientists' articles. It also publishes the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, which does the same thing for scholars in literature, music and the other liberal arts. But that's the problem -- it measures the reputations of scholars much more effectively than it measures the reputations of the writers they're studying. (A number of junior scholars seeking tenure, by the way, are jacking up their citations by citing their own previous papers as often as possible.)

A better source is the Modern Language Association's annual International Bibliography, which categorizes publications by country, period and literary figures within each period. You can count the books and articles devoted to a particular writer, compare this to the results for other authors and get a rough sense of which are being most intensively studied. They may not be the ones most frequently taught, however, as one scholar, William Wortman of Miami University in Ohio, pointed out. Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," for example, is, he said, "at 324 citations in the MLA, as of mid-1999, the most written about post-1960 work in English." But Wortman doubts that it makes it into many courses. The book is prodigiously long, which guarantees that not many students will finish it.

The MLA will not measure which authors are being anthologized, nor in what anthology -- the Norton anthologies and the like or just another wannabe. (Inclusion in anthologies is often determined, as one list member explained, by the relative cost of reprint rights.) Nor will it measure who makes it into the Library of America series and who doesn't, nor who is being studied by famous critics like Helen Vendler and who by junior faculty scrabbling desperately for a niche of their own in the food chain, nor whose works, for that matter, are being adapted for the screen.

Nor do any of these measures necessarily have much to do with what goes on in the culture at large. I checked the Humanities Index, which is similar to the MLA Bibliography but has a somewhat more eclectic reach, to look up the number of articles published on Toni Morrison vs. those on Stephen King over the past five years. Scholars published a mere six articles on King in that time, two of them on movies made from his books. The number of articles on Morrison comes to 114; Morrison has spiked dramatically in the past decade on the graph of academic popularity.

Turn, however, to the rare-book market, a rough but often telling guide to the value book collectors place on various literary reputations, or to Bibliofind.com or one of the other used-and-rare outlets on the Net, and it's instantly clear that collectors think King and Morrison are closer to an equal bet. I asked Ken Lopez, one of the leading dealers in modern first editions, what a first of Toni Morrison's debut novel, "The Bluest Eye," in pristine condition, might bring, and he said between $2,500 and $3,000. Stephen King's first book, "Carrie," in equally pristine condition, is available for $1,000 onBibliofind.The difference in price is attributable not so much to a difference in their perceived "importance" as to their relative scarcity. "Carrie" is much easier to find.

Does this mean what it seems to mean? That out there in the abyss of the market, people who vote with their credit cards on the relative value of various literary reputations actually think King offers nearly as good a return on investment as our latest Nobel Prize winner? Yes. And if you think that's shocking, look at the price Tom Clancy's first book brings. It was, of course, "The Hunt for Red October," and it was published by the Naval Institute Press in a relatively small first printing. The last time I looked, a copy in top condition would set you back something like $750. If you could find one.

Next page | Will Tom Clancy be a household name 400 years from now?