[ryanklee]

> Most new authors are likely subsidized by their wealthy families.

You think most new authors have wealthy families?

That is a very odd assumption, given how hard it is to write a book... and given how low the returns are... and given how many other ways there are to achieve prestige... and given how little people regard authorship these days as a measurement of it... and given how unlikely it would be for wealth to have an outsized representation in a career generally associated with poverty... and how all old authors were once new authors which would imply that most of them are wealthy too, which, not so.

[sturz]

I'm talking about contemporary literature. It has been this way historically and nothing about it has changed.

[ryanklee]

What historical data do you have?

[sturz]

Wikipedia. Most authors in the western cannon are descendants of aristocracy.

[ryanklee]

"Most authors in the Western cannon" as a group is not representative of most authors, Western or otherwise.

[pi-e-sigma]

They are the representation of the _successful_ authors, though. Because they are the cannon now. So the OP is right.

[ryanklee]

He is not right. His original claim was that new authors are mostly wealthy. All he did was weaken his claim until it was (more, but not actually) supportable.

Further, to address your own point, they are not even the representation of successful authors. There's thousands and thousands of successful authors that aren't even near to being close to the gates of the Western canon.