Got home last night from the Key West Literary Seminar. It was my third time at the annual seminar – the first was in 1991 – and I invariably thought of the writers I saw, in some cases met (I covered that first one for the Sun-Sentinel), who are no longer with us: Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, Barry Lopez. Walking past St. Paul’s Episcopal Church I remembered the morning I ran into Jan Morris doing her power walk down Duval Street.
The writers at this year’s seminar were younger, for the most part, far from the realm of literary lions. (One had published only one book, another peppered her sentences with the word “like.”) Dave Barry, a rare elder statesman, walked to the lectern and said: “Hello. I’m Dave Barry. If you don’t know who I am, I’m a famous author.”
It was a funny line that also said something about the position writers hold in contemporary society. (A 20-something volunteer from Miami told me she’d never heard of Dave Barry – but her mother had. Though she was a fan of Campbell McGrath.) When Styron’s picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine, most Americans knew who he was. Should Lauren Groff’s visage ever appear on that cover, the majority of readers will be clueless. But then most Americans no longer see Time.
