in as much as writers are celebrities

Are you freakin’ kidding me? Or perhaps you’ve never heard of certain writers who became celebrities in their time:

1. Jack London
2. Ernest Hemingway
3. George Plimpton
4. Truman Capote (the man who virtually invented the writer-as-celebrity schtick)
5. Norman Mailler (Ditto)
6. Jack Kerouac
7. Jerzy Kosinski
8. Joan Didion
9. Charles Bukowski
10.Hunter S. Thompson

in as much as writers can be celebrities?

I think I’ll let the list rest at 10

No, I am not kidding. Very few writers are celebrities. Some of them are famous, but most are not celebrities. I absolutely agree with Truman Capote and Hunter Thompson from your list, and I definitely think Diablo Cody is a celebrity, but most writers are not, and very few of them achieve much fame.

[...] Barranti can neither write nor knit her way out of this one: Yesterday, in a posting titled Mid Week Round-up: Brushes with Celebrity, Ms. Barranti [...]

Is the argument here that Cody is not a celebrity or that she’s not as famous as Capote, Mailer etc…? I won’t dispute that she’s not as famous as the others you mentioned and will probably never be. Sadly the fact is that most writers will never achieve celebrity like the ten you’ve listed. Celebrity writers are the exception and whatever you think of Ms. Cody as a writer people know who she is. She is having her 15 minutes so I don’t mind her being called a celebrity.

Rodger: Are you serious? Your list is full of exceptions, not the rules. You also have the benefit of history and hindsight to make that list.

How many modern screenwriters can you name, let alone recognize by face?

How many modern screenwriters can you name, let alone recognize by face?

I would say Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh and P.T. Anderson, off-hand, Markland, but this discussion is not about screenwriters; that was just a Barranti obfuscation.

BTW, on the “history and hindsight” argument, David, if one strikes London, Hemingway, and Kerouac from the list (momentarily and for the sake of debate only), you don’t have to reach too far back in modern history to find the relevance of the other cited writers. Hell, Joan Didion is still alive and Mailer and Plimpton only left us recently.

Seeing as I wrote the post, and therefore defined the discussion in the first place, I really can’t possibly obscure it. By the way, Diablo Cody and Jane Espenson both write for the screen.

Well, perhaps you should have made the distinction between screenwriters and novelists; there is a distinction. Your employment of the singular noun writer invited my response and comments.