'Small But Real Pleasure to His Readers'

An amusing coda to Saturday’s post on major and minor writers: "I come from a family of minor writers and intend to join that class in due course. By ‘minor’ I mean something like third-tier–not third-rate, now. What characterizes a third-rate writer is that he can’t write. Not that I would object to being a third-rater myself; many third-raters become fabulously rich, and in any case there’s something to be said for a man who can make millions by doing something he’s no good at.” The writer is Barton Swaim, a columnist and book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. I recommend his book The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics (2015), which manages to make contemporary American politics interesting. The passage quoted above is from Swaim’s “Literary Minority," a column published in 2009 in the Washington Examiner. Call Swaim a comic realist: “The minor writer never gets rich, never achieves anything more than momentary fame, and nobody would call his works important. He has…