Time Essay: Time for a Long, Lazy Trollope Ride

Writers' reputations are as volatile as dollar stocks. Henry James has been up and down the literary Dow Jones so often that his pants are shiny from the ride, while Rudyard Kipling, who won the Nobel Prize for beating the drums of imperialism, is read these days—if he is read at all—almost exclusively by children. Sinclair Lewis, the great name of the '20s—and the first American to win the Nobel for literature—is noticed only by spiders on library shelves, and John Dos Passos, who dominated the '30s, is all but forgotten in the '70s....