It did strike me how many people (not sparing myself here) seem to equate "success" with "published," "best-selling," or even the Neil Gaimanesque level you mention -- maybe it's unfair of me, but it seems sort of particularly American. I mean, I hate the Romantic myth the artist has to starve in a garrett, but you know, _most_ writers don't get that kind of name recognition during their lives. And even authors who are v famous in their own time -- George Sand, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fitzgerald's bestselling bete noir Bruce Barton -- are sort of fringe at best after a lot of decades, or even unread. (That list of bestsellers from decades past someone linked to really struck me, as well. How many of _those_ are being read now?) It just reminds me....partly of Hoop Dreams, where the kids are trying to get into the NBA so hard, and it's like winning the lottery. -- I mean winning the lottery applies to that kind of Gaiman/King/Dickens/Rowling-sized success, where you are a cultural phenomenon. I've read a fair number of biographies of artists over the years, and I think it's pretty rare most of them received what was due in their lifetimes (Melville comes particularly to mind), much less being v well-paid and feted for it.

I wonder how much of this is due to studying authors in college....I mean to a person educated beyond a certain level, James Joyce, say, is _everywhere,_ he's in the Pantheon, we have his letters and biographies and novels and short stories and his awful awful poetry and all that. And yet if you read his letters he's always borrowing or begging money from somewhere or other....there's this weird disconnect that if you are an Author that Really Matters, everything of yours will be in print and readily available and selling like hotcakes, even tho that's not how most bookstores are set up now (weekly new arrivals, midlists not usually kept in stock, chains and suppliers battling over discounts, &c &c).