When we talk about Literature, we seem to think only of Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, William Wordsworth, Tagore or Nazrul. Why is it so? Why do we immediately refer to people from the past? Why can't we consider someone more recent? Maybe the answer lies in the fact that we don't have great writers in our time.
Consider Shakespeare. I hardly think there is any playwright who will ever match his excellence. Nobody even comes close. His work was written in the Elizabethan period but we still don't seem to tire of him. He has continued to fascinate people to this day with the great plays he wrote. There are people who keep making movies from his plays. There are teachers who never get bored of teaching his work. Finally, there are people like me who never stop getting pleasure from reading his work. There is undoubtedly no competition for Shakespeare.
Ernest Hemingway in Milan, 1918
English: Hemingway posing for a dust jacket photo ...
Nazrul Islam Avenue, KolkataOf course, there are other good playwrights too, who have won a good deal of fame. But at present, there are no great names worth considering.
All the authors that we talk about belong to the past. Consider Hemingway, Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, Jane Austin, and many other writers- so many of them that it will take forever to mention them. They were not simply dead writers. They were people who live on to this day. Do you really think; fifty years from now, the writers of our period will be remembered? I hardly think so. So, what are we really looking at? Our future generations will have no Literature to enjoy from our time. Our most popular novelists are authors like Sidney Sheldon and Danielle Steel. But is that Literature! I hardly think there is any art in what they write. Their stories hardly have any deep meaning in them.