What Underappreciated Books Influenced Famous Authors?

2025-09-04 14:05:01 277

4 Answers

Kyle
Kyle
2025-09-06 18:02:37
Okay, nerdy confession: Borges and I are best friends in my head because he turned obscure, marginal texts into whole constellations of ideas. He chewed on weird travelogues, early detective stories, and baroque novellas and then rewired modern literature. One specific underappreciated influence I like to point to is 'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa' by Jan Potocki — it’s a labyrinthine, nested narrative that feels like a prototype for the story-within-a-story games and metafictional novels that followed. Borges admired that kind of structure, and you can trace a lineage to writers who love to play with frame tales and unreliable narrators.

Also, Charles Fort’s compilations of odd phenomena — like 'The Book of the Damned' — are a delightfully weird sourcebook. Fort’s cataloguing of anomalies gave later authors a playful skepticism toward 'official' narratives, and you see that skepticism in so many speculative works that blur folklore, pseudo-science, and conspiracy. When I read these classics alongside the famous works they influenced, I feel like an archaeologist uncovering the scaffolding of creative minds. If you like meta-narratives or gothic-tinged modernism, chase down Potocki or Fort next time you want brain-tingling inspiration.
Benjamin
Benjamin
2025-09-07 22:24:49
Funny how some tiny, dusty books leave fingerprints on whole literary careers — I love digging those out like easter eggs.

I once devoured 'Phantastes' by George MacDonald on a sleepless night and felt its ripples everywhere afterwards. C.S. Lewis openly called MacDonald a formative influence, and if you've read 'The Chronicles of Narnia' you can trace that moral-fantasy sensibility back to MacDonald's fairytale logic. That same old-school fairycraft seeped into other mid-century fantasists I adore, and even certain indie games that toy with mythic morality feel like distant cousins.

Then there's 'The King in Yellow' by Robert W. Chambers: eerie, fragmentary, and not a household favorite, but its influence on weird fiction is massive. H.P. Lovecraft borrowed the sense of an insinuating, cursed text and climate of existential dread; later, you can spot those vibes in horror comics and games that build dread through suggestion rather than gore. Finding these underappreciated books is like mapping secret tributaries feeding the big rivers of modern genres — and I keep a growing shelf of them, always ready to recommend my next hidden treasure.
Uri
Uri
2025-09-08 10:15:26
Sometimes the best literary seeds are tiny and overlooked. A go-to example I keep bringing up is Robert W. Chambers’ 'The King in Yellow' — it’s not mainstream, but its half-glimpsed cult play and sense of cosmic malaise seeped into H.P. Lovecraft’s weird mythos and later horror culture. Reading it feels like seeing the blueprint for how dread can be cultural rather than just bodily.

Another compact, powerful influence is Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 'We' — Orwell took structural and thematic cues for '1984' from it, and that lineage explains a lot about how modern dystopias stage the human cost of systems. If you enjoy dystopian shows, noir comics, or moody RPGs, exploring these lesser-known sources gives a richer map of where familiar tropes actually come from and makes re-reading contemporary favorites feel fresh again.
Una
Una
2025-09-09 19:31:17
I'll be blunt: 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin is one of those quieter, potent books that gets credit from other authors more than from casual readers. George Orwell openly acknowledged that 'We' shaped the bones of '1984' — not copycatting, but that same glassy, mechanized terror of a regimented society. If you enjoy dystopian tropes in games or manga, reading 'We' explains where the blueprint started.

Another underdog is 'The Golden Bough' by James Frazer. It sounds academic, but it gave mid-century writers the vocabulary to stitch myth into modern stories. T.S. Eliot and other modernists used mythic parallels to give their fragmented works coherence; you can see that method echoed in contemporary storytelling that borrows ancient rites to make modern meaning. These books aren’t flashy, but they’re the quiet engines behind a lot of what we call classic influence.
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