The Advantage to Being Unheralded in Your Time

The downside to someone like Philip Roth or David Foster Wallace is we've spent a lot of time already deducing what these books mean. So the people who are actually have the best chance of seeming very important in a hundred years are kind of blank slates. There's a weird advantage to being unheralded in your time because if you are, that sort of becomes the meaning of your work. But if you'reunheralded and kind of unknown, it's really open to the people who want to care later.