THE HAUTE 100 & THE HOTBOT 25

posted by James Reel

    The current to-do over AOL’s release of search terms to researchers, seen as a privacy breach, reminds me that I wrote about a much more harmless and fun release of search data several years ago. Way back in the summer of 1999, the search site HotBot compared its queries to a list of top authors that had just been issued by the Modern Library. This is what I had to say about that publicity stunt …

    Alone, cold and adrift in cyberspace, poor Lawrence Durell seems to have no home page on the Web. And that's just as well; if he did, no one would visit. How pathetic it would be for an author on the Modern Library's Top 100 English-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century list to wrap himself in a few tattered HTML tagwords and cling to some dismal sand-colored electronic wallpaper, waiting in vain for the Internet's impersonal search engines to point someone his way.
    Durell, the author of the Alexandria Quartet, was one of six authors on the Modern Library's Haute Hundred list ignored by users of the search site HotBot during June, 1999. Also snubbed were James M. Cain, James T. Farrell, John O'Hara, Muriel Spark, and Booth Tarkington.
    Once the initial hubbub over the Modern Library's rankings died down, HotBot looked into how those vaunted authors rated in terms of actual public interest. It checked the Modern Library list against queries logged at its site during one four-week period. The results weren't too surprising; after all, who but Orson Welles fans would care about Booth Tarkington anymore? Still, HotBot's rankings suggest which Great Twentieth-Century English-Language Authors attract the interest of real people, rather than the interest of a publisher trying to hawk its backlist.
    Some caveats are in order. First, HotBot declined to tell me how many total hits it counted for each author. HotBot, a member of the Lycos Network, currently attracts "more than 7.1 million users monthly, according to Media Metrix." Several million of those searches probably seek Traci Lords sites or stills from the Pamela Anderson Lee sex video or any number of non-literary topics. So the first-place writer may have spurred thousands of inquiries, or only a couple of dozen.
    Also, because the statistics were gathered over the course of only one month, we can't generalize from them with any confidence. But because the figures were gleaned during June, too late for most term-paper research, they probably do reflect the interests of the general public rather than desperate students.
    Here are the 20th-century literary authors who scored the highest among HotBot searches during June, 1999, along with my own intrusive commentary:
    1. James Joyce
    Many anti-elitists howled at One-Eyed Jim's perch atop the Modern Library rankings, but he also takes pride of place on the search-frequency list. Perhaps readers just need more help figuring Joyce out, but the fact remains that people are making the effort to learn something about him and his work. A HotBot publicist told me that Joyce had almost three times as many searches as the tenth-place finisher, Graham Greene, and seven times as many as the twenty-fifth-place finisher, John Dos Passos. Maybe you math fans could turn this into a story problem.
    2. George Orwell
    3. John Steinbeck
    Acccording to my HotBot source, Joyce, Orwell and Steinbeck were way out ahead of the fourth-place finisher:
    4. Ernest Hemingway
    Here's the one instance in which current events may have influenced the figures. Hemingway's True at First Light had just been published, surely spurring renewed interest in the author. Maybe the winners of the bad-Hemingway-writing contest had recently been announced, too. At any rate, you can't hold being in the news against an author who's been dead nearly 40 years.
    5. Virginia Woolf
    Woolf's placement this high really shouldn't be surprising. Her works remain intensely interesting to feminists, Bloomsbury cultists (who are legion) and, for that matter, me. (Minutes before I started writing this column, I finished reading Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway—as a prelude to Michael Cunningham's The Hours—and I find myself inexplicably devastated.)
    6. Jack London
    7. Rudyard Kipling
    Now, there's an interesting pair of authors adventuring through worlds quite unlike ours. You'd think they would have fallen from fashion by now, but obviously good yarns enjoy longevity.
    8. James Baldwin
    As a writer, Baldwin was the quintessential Angry Young Black Man, even when he was an old man, and his works have enjoyed a renaissance in the 1990s, now that he's safely dead. Still, it's a bit surprising for him to outdistance Ralph Ellison just now (see the remark after No. 20).
    9. Joseph Conrad
    10. Jack Kerouac
    11. Graham Greene
    12. Henry James
    13. Aldous Huxley
    14. Edith Wharton
    15. J.D. Salinger
    Who could question that cluster of seven authors, no matter the ranking? Kerouac and Huxley may, unjustifiably, be remembered in the 21st century as one-book authors, but somehow those single novels—On the Road and Brave New World—will probably never fall from the A list, even though in different ways they ought to seem terribly dated by now.
    16. Willa Cather
    17. Nathanael West
    Those two are a surprise. It would be heartening to know that readers were checking up on Cather's historical inaccuracies in Death Comes for the Archbishop, an overrated book that makes heroes of some particularly unpleasant figures in New Mexico history. West is a more interesting writer and figure; I wonder if the HotBot searchers were trying to determine why his Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust, over-the-top black comedies both, are so damned depressing.
    18. Henry Miller
    19. Evelyn Waugh
    20. Ralph Ellison
    Miller and Waugh can rest in peace, as far as I'm concerned. But I am astonished that Ellison falls so low on this list. Juneteenth, his long-awaited (and posthumous) second novel, was published during the month of the HotBot survey. Given that accident of chronology if nothing else, I'd expect Ellison to be lurking up in Hemingway's neighborhood, certainly somewhere above Baldwin. Pehaps Juneteenth is just too difficult; after all, those Hemingway inquiries might have concerned the high school favorite The Old Man and the Sea rather than True at First Light. At least it's fitting that Ellison keep company with the next author on the list, whose style overspreads Juneteenth like batter on a drumstick.
    21. William Faulkner
    22. F. Scott Fitzgerald
    23. Joseph Heller
    24. Robert Penn Warren
    25. John Dos Passos
    Rather odd to find this last pair of three-named authors lurking in the Top 25, when so popular a writer as Kurt Vonnegut came in at 61. Still, I find among my friends that there has been a surge of interest in Dos Passos since the Library of America reissued his U.S.A. in 1996. I'd prefer that reason, anyway, to the possibility that fans of Mexican beer are confusing Dos Passos with Dos Equis.