When did writers become celebrities?

From Truman Capote to Stephen King, J. K. Rowling and Richard Osman, how the author became part of the story

In November 1966, Truman Capote threw a party at the Plaza Hotel in New York. It was called the Black and White Ball, and the guests included an extraordinary assortment of actors, politicians, socialites, artists, writers, and people who seemed famous primarily for knowing other famous people. Everyone wore masks. 

Newspapers covered the preparations, the guest list and the event itself with the sort of fascination normally reserved for royal weddings. And at the centre of it all was a small, extravagantly dressed man with an unmistakable voice who had recently published a book about the murder of a Kansas family.

Capote had become a celebrity. Not simply a successful novelist, or even a famous writer. He was someone whose parties were news, whose friendships were news, whose clothes and opinions and quarrels were news. People who had never read Breakfast at Tiffany's or In Cold Blood knew who Truman Capote was. He appeared on television, cultivated the rich and famous, and seemed to understand that being a writer could involve considerably more than sitting alone in a room producing sentences. The author himself had become part of the entertainment.

Which makes me wonder when, exactly, this happened. When did writers become celebrities? And perhaps more interestingly, what happened to the relationship between writers and readers when they did?

Because we've reached a rather peculiar moment in literary culture. Stephen King is one of the most recognisable names in popular entertainment. J. K. Rowling created a fictional universe that became a global cultural phenomenon. Joan Didion, who spent much of her career writing about the distance between appearance and reality, became a fashion icon. Martin Amis was discussed almost as much for his personality and public reputation as for his novels. Meanwhile, Richard Osman and Graham Norton have travelled in the opposite direction, arriving at fiction with the sort of public recognition most novelists could only dream about.

Some writers become famous because of their books. Others write books because they're already famous. And increasingly, both kinds of author occupy the same bestseller lists.

But I wonder whether there's a difference between being famous for writing and being famous as a writer.

When the writer became the entertainment

Of course, literary celebrity didn't begin with Capote. Lord Byron was a celebrity long before anyone had invented the term personal brand. Oscar Wilde understood the publicity value of a well-timed remark, and Charles Dickens was mobbed by admirers on his reading tours. Mark Twain turned the author into a recognisable public performer, while Ernest Hemingway constructed a larger-than-life identity involving war, hunting, fishing, drinking and the general business of being Ernest Hemingway.

Writers have always been able to become famous. What changed during the twentieth century was the machinery available to make them famous, and the increasingly intimate relationship between the writer and the public. Newspapers, glossy magazines, radio and eventually television created an audience that could encounter an author without necessarily encountering the author's work.

Capote understood this almost instinctively. He was an extraordinary writer, capable of producing prose of remarkable delicacy and control, but he was also a brilliant self-publicist. He could be charming, outrageous, cruel and endlessly entertaining. His voice was instantly recognisable, his opinions reliably provocative, and his social life provided a continuing narrative for journalists to follow. The success of In Cold Blood in 1966 made him a major literary figure, but the Black and White Ball suggested that he had become something else as well. He wasn't merely writing about American society. He was staging himself at its centre.

Norman Mailer offered a rather different version of the same phenomenon. Where Capote cultivated glamour, Mailer cultivated confrontation. He was a novelist, journalist, essayist, political commentator, occasional political candidate and a man who seemed incapable of entering a public disagreement without turning it into a performance. His television appearances could be combative, and his feuds were part of his public identity. Mailer seemed to regard the writer as someone who ought to occupy a central position in the culture, arguing with politicians, challenging other writers and generally refusing to remain politely in the literary pages.

Gore Vidal was equally accomplished at turning disagreement into entertainment, although his preferred weapon was usually a beautifully sharpened sentence. His televised clashes with William F. Buckley Jr. during the 1968 American political conventions became famous far beyond the world of books. Vidal's wit, his confidence and his willingness to say something outrageous made him ideal television material. You didn't need to have read Myra Breckinridge or Burr to enjoy watching Gore Vidal dismantle somebody in public.

Something extraordinary was happening in this period. Novelists and essayists could become national personalities simply by being articulate, opinionated and willing to argue. They were invited onto television not necessarily to promote a new book, but because people wanted to hear what they thought.

Imagine that as a regular feature of contemporary television.

The writer as a public personality

The literary celebrity of the 1960s and 1970s was often a curious mixture of intellectual authority and show business. Capote, Mailer and Vidal weren't simply promoting novels. They were performing versions of themselves, and the performance became inseparable from the reputation.

But the arrangement contained a problem. The more successful the public personality became, the harder it was for the writer to escape it.

Capote is perhaps the most poignant example. After In Cold Blood, he spent years promising a great novel about the wealthy and powerful people whose company he enjoyed. That novel, Answered Prayers, became almost as famous for its long, troubled gestation and the social damage caused by its published excerpts as for the writing itself. The gossip surrounding the book threatened to overwhelm the book. Capote had made himself indispensable to a particular social world, then discovered what happened when he attempted to turn that world into literature.

Mailer, meanwhile, became so closely associated with his public combativeness that his books sometimes seemed to arrive as further episodes in the ongoing drama of Norman Mailer. The literary career and the personality were constantly competing for attention.

And perhaps that's the first real danger of literary celebrity. A writer creates a public identity to attract attention to the work, only to discover that the identity has become the more interesting story.

Joan Didion and the writer as an image

Joan Didion represents something quite different. She was never a celebrity in the flamboyant Capote sense, and her public manner was almost the opposite of Mailer's. She didn't need to dominate a room. Much of her appeal came from the impression that she was standing slightly apart from it, watching everyone else.

Yet Didion became an icon.

The sunglasses, the cigarette, the slight figure, the carefully controlled expression, the cool intelligence. Her photographs circulated as images of a particular kind of literary sensibility. By the time she appeared in a Céline advertising campaign in 2015, aged eighty, her image had become recognisable to people who might never have read Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album.

There is something wonderfully strange about that. Didion spent much of her career examining the stories people tell themselves, the images they construct and the unstable relationship between appearance and reality. And eventually she became an image herself.

But Didion's celebrity rested on something more complicated than style. Her prose created an extraordinarily distinctive consciousness on the page. The coolness, the precision, the sense of emotional turbulence being held just below the surface: these qualities became associated with the person as well as the writing. Readers didn't simply admire her sentences. They became fascinated by the kind of person who could write them.

Which raises an interesting question. When we recognise a writer's public image before we read the work, are we already hearing the prose differently?

Do Didion's sentences sound cooler because we've seen the photographs? Or do the photographs seem cool because we've read the sentences?

I suspect the relationship works both ways.

Martin Amis and the literary personality

Martin Amis occupied another version of this territory, particularly in Britain. His father was Kingsley Amis, already a famous novelist, which meant Martin entered literary life with a surname that attracted attention before he had established his own reputation. But he quickly developed a voice so distinctive that the family connection became only one part of the story.

Amis was witty, combative, opinionated and often spectacularly quotable. His novels were discussed as literary events, but so were his interviews, friendships, rivalries, relationships and occasionally his teeth. The British press seemed fascinated by the idea of Martin Amis almost independently of whatever Martin Amis happened to be writing.

And yet his celebrity was inseparable from his style. Amis didn't simply write novels. He offered readers a recognisable way of seeing the world: comic, cruel, linguistically extravagant and endlessly suspicious of cliché. His critical writing reinforced that identity. When you read The War Against Cliché, you're not merely encountering opinions about other writers. You're encountering Martin Amis being Martin Amis, which is part of the pleasure.

This is where literary celebrity becomes particularly interesting. We don't necessarily resent a writer for having a recognisable personality. Quite the opposite. Sometimes that's exactly what we're buying.

A new Martin Amis novel promised more than a story. It promised another encounter with a particular intelligence, another opportunity to hear that unmistakable voice doing something new.

The author had become a kind of literary brand, although I suspect Amis would have had something entertainingly unpleasant to say about the phrase.

Stephen King and the writer who escaped the book

Then there's Stephen King, who changes the scale of the conversation completely.

King's fame isn't primarily the fame of a literary intellectual. He didn't become a household name by arguing with other writers on television or cultivating fashionable society. He became famous by telling stories that enormous numbers of people wanted to read, and then by watching those stories travel far beyond the books themselves.

Think about how much of Stephen King's imaginative world has entered popular culture. Carrie. The Shining. It. Misery. The Shawshank Redemption. Stand by Me. The haunted hotels, murderous clowns, telekinetic teenagers, isolated writers and ordinary American towns where something terrible is waiting just beneath the surface.

You can know Stephen King's work without having read Stephen King.

That's an extraordinary achievement, although it's also a slightly peculiar one for a writer. His stories have become films, television series, cultural references and shared nightmares. The name Stephen King has come to signify an entire territory of popular imagination. Put his