I'm told Herman Melville's Moby Dick was considered unreadable by many critics in its own day, but I'll leave that tale to someone more qualified to tell it.

In my own field, some of the major names in British war poetry were essentially unknown in their own time on a popular level. Wilfred Owen is a good example of this; while well-regarded by most of the very few people who had read him, his works were virtually ignored both during and after the war in spite of the attempt of certain more famous authors to popularize them. Siegfried Sassoon had arranged for Owen's collected poems to be published after his death, for example, in 1920; by 1921 they had only sold 730 copies, and an attempt to bring out a more accessible second edition met with even greater failure. The 700 copies prepared for that edition still hadn't sold out by 1929, and many ended up being pulped. In the same timeframe, to offer a comparison, the collected poems of another fallen soldier-poet (Rupert Brooke) had sold some 300,000 copies in Britain alone.

Other problems in this line persisted. The prominent poet W.B. Yeats was approached to prepare the new Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, and this highly influential and widely-selling volume was notable in its deliberate exclusion of what we would now consider the war's most notable poetry. Yeats excluded Owen (and all of the most famous material from Sassoon, and Thomas, and Rosenberg, and Gurney, and Graves, and Gibson, and so on, though some of them made it in with other works) on the principle that "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry." A letter from Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley written in December of 1936 reveals an even more thorough contempt for Owen's achievement:

"My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum -- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology -- he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . ."

His reference to the "critics getting more and more angry" suggests that popular opinion on Owen and his compatriots was coming around to something like what it is today, but it remains the case that Owen's own canonical status would not be really established until the explosive popularity of Sir Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1962), which took a good deal of his poetry as its basis.

It would be fair now to say that Owen's poetry of the First World War -- particularly something like "Anthem for Doomed Youth" or "Dulce et Decorum Est" -- is the most widely recognized and oft-anthologized in the English-speaking world, but this was not always the case.

Homage to Catalonia is now rightly considered a classic. It was published in 1938, but it didn't even sell a thousand copies in its first year of publication and it received decidedly mixed reviews. The bewildering complexity of the Spanish Civil War and the shifting alliances of WWII explain its slow acceptance. Orwell was critical of the communists in Spain, which limited his ability to publish through his normal channels. He faced opposition not only from the left, but right-wing critics also bashed the book. This was part of an overall climate of highly partisan rhetoric regarding the Spanish Civil War in the international community.

Later, fascism and Stalinist communism as enemies was a much easier sell. After his death in 1950, the book grew in popularity--including an American edition. Inconvenient politics made Homage less popular at its publication than it is now.