The recognition of Hugo as a great poet at the time of his death was followed by a period of critical neglect.
The first rediscovery took place during Leskov's own lifetime: in the 1880s, after he had suffered for years "an almost total critical neglect, the young Chekhov hailed his oeuvre, declaring him "a mixture of an elegant Frenchman and a defrocked priest".
However, while there has been lively -albeit subtly constricted- discourse about the leaks in the United States, prompting President Obama's recent announcement of reforms, in Britain the issue has suffered from an alarming degree of critical neglect, especially it seems from Members of Parliament.
This harsh judgment was followed by the work's physical deterioration and gradual fading from view, lost beneath an obscuring veil of soot and an equally impenetrable veil of critical neglect.
He maintained a steady career throughout five decades, initially in the theatre and then in mainstream cinema, but he suffered the critical neglect so often accorded those who tackle a variety of subjects and genres and become known, somewhat disparagingly, as journeyman directors.
The biographies and criticism on him are full of statements about his critical neglect, his disappointments, and his political differences with other black artists and intellectuals.
After his death, in 1961, his work fell into critical neglect.
The decades of public and critical neglect were reversed in 1994, when Three Tall Women won the Pulitzer.
Decades of critical neglect followed, punctuated by brief spurts of interest when devotees like Mr. Vidal or Jonathan Franzen made the case for Mr. Purdy as a major artist.
That clarity should be penalised by critical neglect is perhaps unfair, though it's not every writer who welcomes critical attention.
Stephen King, who preceded her, had taken the assembled literati to task for its critical neglect of writers such as John Grisham, Tom Clancy and himself.
