Questions: Is there any more tenuous, insecure, and impossible job than a writer’s? Are there ever any judgments more unforgiving than literary judgments? Why do we, or did we (back when we, for better or worse, cared a little more than we do now), insist on evaluating a writer’s career—the career which is the life—so much more ruthlessly than we do other jobs? We don’t say of an engineer, “Obviously, she’s not too bright—she’s never been able to combine quantum physics and general relativity into one unified theory.” Or of a schoolteacher, “Poor thing. He’ll never be Aristotle.” We don’t need our plumber to have won the Most Famous Plumber in the World trophy. But it’s just perfectly fine to dismiss the whole of a writer’s life and career with “His work is not going to survive in fifty years.” The bar for literary achievement is remorselessly high—and so are the stakes.