Writers no one reads, but ought to

Literary Hub highlights a site celebrating forgotten writers- which, it maintains, and probably rightly, we will all be). This one stands out from a dazzling list I want to go find at once:

Marguerite Young (1908-1995)

Category: A writer who takes so long to finish a novel that everyone forgets about her

Marguerite Young’s death in 1995 resulted in one of the most fascinating obituaries(published in the New York Times) I’ve ever read. Here’s a paragraph from it:

[She] was a woman with the pageboy haircut who looked like W. H. Auden, wrote like James Joyce, strode through the Village in her signature serapes, had breakfast at Bigelow’s with Richard Wright, got drunk at the White Horse Tavern with Dylan Thomas, palled around with Truman Capote and Carson McCullers, kept a vast collection of dolls in her Bleecker Street apartment and regaled intimates with tales of her romantic conquests.

In the midst of this rich personal life, she spent 20 years writing the sprawling, 1,200 page Miss Macintosh, My Darling, a novel that serves as a cure for writer’s block for a character in Anne Tyler’s Accidental Tourist.