In its kind this speedy oblivion by which a once famous man so long survived his fame is almost unique, and it is not easily explicable.Whoever, arrested for a moment by the tidings of the author's death, turns back now to the books that were so much read and so much talked about forty years ago has no difficulty in determining why they were then read and talked about. His difficulty will be rather to discover why they are read and talked about no longer.
Herman Melville