(*20th century)
I noticed that American works of outsized literary ambition from the past century (Robert Caro's biography of LBJ, Game of Thrones, Gravity's Rainbow, etc) are written by white guys, which I'm guessing is an institutional thing; that maybe marginalized authors just haven't been able to convince a publisher, "Gimme a million dollars, I'll be back in a decade."
That they have a harder time securing the investments that would sustain them for as long as it might've taken to write those books.
Samuel Delaney's Dhalgren comes to mind as a relatively well-known kind of literary pillar. But I'm having a hard time thinking of other books by marginalized authors that aren't just intellectually or imaginative huge and ambitious, but in terms of pagecount, heft; books whose size reflects that the publisher had faith in the author.
by thousandmoviepod