"In the old days," the novelist Henry Bech, John Updike's fictional alter ego, once said, "a respectable author never asked for an advance; that was strictly for the no-talents starving down in the Village".
The police had to be persuaded that this was a respectable author who liked climbing things from the outside and not an inept cat burglar returning to the scene of his crime).
"As for the recently dead," pointed out another contributor, "any number of respectable modern authors have used them - Muriel Spark's Aiding and Abetting used the Lord Lucan case, Colum McCann's Dancer used Nureyev, and umpteen authors have used Marilyn Monroe".
However it was long considered perfectly respectable for an author to mimic or even copy classical models.
"The Use and Abuse of Literature," the latest book by the prolific Harvard literary scholar Marjorie Garber, is in part about this "centripetal movement" in artistic appreciation "from the edges to the center, from the outside to the inside, incorporating once disparaged genres and authors into respectable, canonical and even classic status".
Either reason is respectable, but if an author's family's next meal is entirely dependent upon their book sales, they're under enormous pressure.
As if in response, four authors of very respectable stature appeared.
Its leading lights range from respectable rightwingers such as US authors Larry Correia and Brad Torgerson, through to those with more outlandish views such as John C Wright and Vox Day (also known as Theodore Beale).
Furthermore, while my publication record is solid—I have a reasonable number of publications in very respectable journals, including several first-author publications none of my papers are in Cell, Nature, or Science.
