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Neal Stephenson’s got a new interview up on Salon, which
is lengthy and fascinating as you might expect. The following quote
stuck out for me, though, as something that has always sort of tickled
the back of my brain on the topic of “great literature”; here
Stephenson’s talking about Dickens and 19th-century serialized fiction: “I think that
they found gainful employment producing stuff that was meant to be
entertaining, that readers of the Strand magazine would enjoy reading. A
lot of it was forgettable, but guess what, a lot of what those kinds of
people wrote is now thought of as literature.”