Post the most overrated books or overrated personalities of literature. Let's express honest opinions

Post the most overrated books or overrated personalities of literature. Let's express honest opinions.

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I forgot how funny that picture is

The Great Gatsby is my go-to answer
On a more obvious yet even truer level, Rupi Kaur

Jonathan Franzen "The Great American Novelist".
Really? Time magazine? Corrections a book about melodrama family. How many times we have read this kind of shit? Does he wants to be the next DFW?

Elizabethan England? Please- I’ll grant you Shakespeare, Milton, & above both- John Donne. Who comes next? No 1 that can reasonably be granted greatness. The assorted Dynastic periods of China? Tu Fu & Li Po I’ll grant, & perhaps Po-Chu-I, but you’re stretching the definition of an age when it spans centuries, & after those 3 you are left with ‘poets’ who wore that appellation about as neatly as a Joyce Carol Oates- most were routine scribes who wrote routine verse. Haiku? Bashō, Buson, Issa- then who? Not to mention that 3 line haikus- even at their best- simply cannot match the depth, complexity, nor music of even a sonnet. Latin American poets in the early-mid 20th Century? There are a few greats- Paz, Neruda, Huidobro come to mind- but most were just political hacks- bumper sticker writers. The French Symbolists? Mallarme & who else? The Romantics? Hmm….England- Shelley, Keats, perhaps Coleridge & Wordsworth. Forget Byron or Clare- the rest fall off a cliff. Perhaps the German Romantics? Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Holderlin, Heine? Puh-leeze! Perhaps the Soviet Era poets of Russia? Pasternak, Mandelstam, & Tsvetaeva are greats, while Akhmadulina, & Akhmatova were pretty good. Don’t even try to make a claim for the propagandist Mayakovsky.
Now, here’s a pretty good list of the major American poets who were writing & came to fame during the 1910-1970 period: Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Archibald MacLeish, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Edwin Rolfe, Charles Olson, Robert Hayden, John Berryman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, James Emanuel, W.D Snodgrass, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Anne Sexton, Weldon Kees, & Sylvia Plath come to mind without much effort. & some could argue this list is only ½ or ⅓ its proper length.

Gravity's Rainbow is inferior to both M&D and AtD
DeLillo should never be mentioned in the same breath as Gaddis, Gass, McElroy, or Barthelme
DFW and Franzen both disdain highbrow fiction and despite DFW's early maximalist work he shouldn't be lumped in with the greats he despised in his later years
The Savage Detectives is one of the worst books I have ever read (2666 was fantastic)
Sylvia Plath is garbage compared to her husband's work
C.S. Lewis is a terrible writer

Gertrude Stein should be completely forgotten by this point

>McElroy
My nigga.

cosmoetica.com/top43-des40.htm

Tolkien was just a linguistic nerd
Jonathan Franzen is overrated as fuck
Lovecraft was a terrible writer, Thomas Ligotti it's 100x better.

Lovecraft and Ligotti are on different planes though. The former constructed a whole Mythos and world sui generis, with a steady prose style derived from Edgar Allen Poe turned into his own, while the latter is good at atmospheric surreal horror pieces.