It makes me wonder, on a larger scale, what all we're forgetting? Like could there be some pulp sci-fi story that is actually the most amazing thing ever but got buried just because it wasn't by a famous name like Doc Smith or Edmond Hamilton? Could there be a 1980s comic book nobody remembers because the publisher never made it big (actually I can name a few--the work of RAK Graphics, whose most well known character is Chakan the Forever Man and chances are most of you still said "who?")
The '20s-30s era of pulp SF/genre fiction is really tricky to look at. There was a lot of stuff that got put into anthologies in the 60s-80s. Isaac Asimov and Damon Knight both had anthologies specifically for pre-Campbellian SF. I think others may have had them too but they're evidently not as well known as these two.
Of the 20s-30s era of pre-campbellian SF, you have Doc Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Murray Leinster, Stanley Weinbaum, Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Raymond Z. Gallun, and a few others that would become listed as prime examples. I'll even go out of the SF genre and point to Weird Tales magazine. Every author of note or skill from that magazine's been noticed and collected in some form now. DMR Books, Wildside Press, etc. Fucking Nictin Dzyalys and Manly Bannister have been collected. Granted, Weird Tales is probably one of the premier examples of pulp magazines.
Where you'd have to really do a deep dive into "rediscovering" pulp era writers is probably in the other magazines. Astounding Science Fiction, Weird Tales, and Black Mask are all pretty well documented. It's the shit like Argosy Magazine that seems to go to the wayside, with so much shit being sorta rediscovered by Steeger Press/Atlus Books and turned into print on demand books. H. Bedford Jones, Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, and the like are all hella fun writers that wrote adventures in their time. They're mostly forgotten now. Fucking Harold Lamb was almost forgotten until Howard Andrew Jones got University of Nebraska Press to collect works.
Talbot Mundy, Abraham Merritt, Lord Dunsany? All pseudo-forgotten outside of hardcore enthusiasts and academics. There's people screaming into the void that these guys should be read for being so damned enjoyable.
Lin Carter did his part in bringing the history of Fantasy as we know it today with his editing of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. For sci-fi, it was fortunate that a lot of the mid-20th century writers and editors were able to serve as pseudo-historians. Jack Williamson, Sam Moskowitz, James E. Gunn, Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, and a host of others were either well read in the genre or knew people historically tied to the genre in some fashion (Hugo Gernsback, Doc Smith, ERB, Robert E. Howard, Abraham Merritt, Otis Adelbert Kline, etc.).
If it weren't for all these older writers and enthusiastic fanzine researchers from the mid-late 20th century, we probably wouldn't know as much about the development of sci-fi/fantasy/horror. You had David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner reaching out to an elderly Manly Wade Wellman and etc. There's lots of stories like this. The love for the medium kept the fans as historians until the academic world started taking studying sci-fi/fantasy/pulps more seriously (which was probably partially kickstarted by Jack Williamson when he got his PhD and began teaching. He was one of the early SF pulpsters in the late '20s and remained a fixture for 7 decades.)
Ellison could be pretty outspoken but he had a good point about "cultural amnesia" or whatever it's called when it comes to creative works of all kinds being forgotten with the passage of time and only a few being remembered in the public conscious for whatever reason. For printed works in general they've decreased in popularity overall considering the rise of mediums like television and the Internet so that probably doesn't help.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=1b0Mx99_U5QAnother big issue that explains people being unaware is that for movies, TV shows and games for example there is just an endless flow of new content. It just never stops, there is simply endless entertainment. There is a focus on what is new constantly. People have to go out of their way to check out the older stuff.
Yeah, and this leads to a sort of ouroborous scenario where the stuff gets screwed up. People may love it, but they consume the slop and wind up making increasingly sloppier stuff. It's resulted in the modern major publishers maybe having a handful of worthwhile SF writers and everything else being slop made by women/faggots.
Get people to read more and things may be good sometime again. I hate how so many fanfiction tier smut/shipping fixated writers infest modern Western entertainment.
I always remember a couples harlan ellison rants going over this where he just rattled off the names of a dozen authors he concidered the creme of the crop that where already forgotten and one on clarence budington Kelland, basically one of the best selling most popular writers of his time but completely forgot and obscure today. Book authors got it rough, outside of the immortal classics and stuff connected to pop culture franchises it's incredibly hard to leave a lasting mark. Genuinely try to think about the millions and millions authors that have existed and think about how many you could name, even if 99.9% is complete shit so many good writers are still forgotten.
Even if most people have no delusions that they'll make it big and be remembered forever its kinda frightening how easy it for people to forget. If asked a random person about Spencer Tracy, James Stuart or even Henry fonda how many would know who they where, sure some film enthusiasts will and some may recognize the name but I'm sure it'll be a small minority. Those guys where some of the biggest names in the world back then, if there so easily forgotten what chance do we got.
It's always good to keep enjoying old stuff, there's more great stuff to read, play or watch than can be experienced in a life time.
The other issue here is that the good old stuff oft gets derided and labeled by reactionary postmodernist retards as "racist" and "problematic" and that's kind of dogmatically taught over and over.
I'll give you a few more popular writers of their day that are almost totally forgotten. Frank Yerby, Alistair Maclean, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Cain and Woolrich have a major niche in genre fiction, so they're not as forgotten. Maclean's still read and had a massive influence on film thrillers and has shitloads of books on the used market. Noone knows who the fuck Yerby is any more. I don't think he was a genre writer per se either, so he doesn't have a small group of dedicated autists talking about him.
God forbid you were a popular generalist literary writer that's now forgotten, without any genre fiction autists or pop culture influence. People will remember Stanley Weinbaum (died young, only wrote for 2 years. work's not reprinted that often, but by god he's got an entry in the SF Hall of Fame anthology set that's been reprinted forever. ) but some guy like Yerby? Nah. Daphne du Maurier and Ramsey Campbell will be eternally appreciated by horror enthusiasts, right? But someone like Yerby will have people shrugging and moving on.
Granted there's also genre disinterest too. Westerns being on the decline in popularity for a few decades means that only a dozen names may be perennially remembered. Zane Grey, Max Brand, Louis L'Amour, Larry MacMurty, Elmore Kelton, Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, and probably a few more I'm not remembering. Historical Fiction's in a similar place, but it's wider in scope.
Short of a culture stagnating, you're always going to end up in a situation where you keep adding new stuff to the pile and the living will always be more interested in newer books/music/movies/VG/etc. because it's their here and now. Their kids will do the same. I'm sure Ellison can name all the great SciFi authors of the mid 20th century, but even he couldn't read everything that came out then much less during his own lifetime or before those guys. The biggest advantage we have is those hard copy works still exist and are being digitized (legally or otherwise) and we have access to them.
Ellison read a lot and interacted with a lot of them. But yeah, there's always the odd quasi-forgotten one like John Taine that did have decent work and whatnot.
For every notable one, there's 3 forgotten ones.
