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The headline from last week’s article reveals the problem as well as anything else might: “King: Writers with Commercial Success Need Recognition.”

AP writer Hillel Italie’s article goes on to inform us of Stephen King’s recent acceptance speech for an honorary lifetime achievement award from the Nation Book Foundation during which he called for literary critics to pay more attention to popular writers. The most obvious question this brings up is why? What on earth do these popular writers need attention for? They already have popularity; why do critics need to champion them?

Granted, the more literary-minded books, often created by those who teach creative writing at such respected institutes of higher learning as EastWestern University, may be just as subject to trends, whims, fashions, and formulae as their better-selling counterparts, but at least these authors are trying. Literary pretentions indicate literary ambitions, and popular writers, wisely, stay away from those. They don’t, after all, want to alienate their audiences with post-feminist narrative self-referentiality, say. It might hurt sales.

Those who are less concerned with maintaining a fan base can spread their literary wings a bit and venture a little closer the Sun. The critics champion this because it’s doing something, not just trying to better the last book.

This really isn’t an issue of “good” or “bad” literature, however. Such pronouncements aren’t up to us to decide, though we’ll invariably argue endlessly over them anyhow. The declaration of greatness belongs to those who will be reading fifty or a hundred years from now, those who are able to determine what’s still good. And those writers may be people writing now who have not even been discovered, perhaps writers like Bean Newton, who pass on before they have found their place and need critics like myself to resurrect them.

You may be saying that King’s notion has some merit. I mean, millions of people can’t be that wrong, and after all, weren’t some of the truly great writers of the past also popular? Dickens was all the rage in his day, and Shakespeare himself wrote as much for the groundlings as the elite up in the boxes.

Laying aside the notion that millions of people can be wrong, the rest of that is true. But for all the popular writers who happen to be great, there are an equal number of unpopular or unkown ones of whom we have come to realize the greatness. Some of them, like Dickinson and Kafka, tried to avoid the public eye entirely. For every Whitman trumpeting his yawp into the public ear there is a Gerard Manley Hopkins, toiling away at his churchly duties. Then there are the “literary” writers, those who wrote for the elite unapologetically, we still revere: Eliot, Pound, Joyce—people who are difficult to access, but worth studying because thier work is rewarding and because their work changed the face of literature itself and helped to advance the art.

So popular writers relly don’t need literary critics to advance them. And anyway, they might not be too pleased with what the critics have to say.