As most statements by professional athletes are platitudes, we tend to inflate the value of those that aren’t. Examples of the latter include gnomic utterances by the baseballer Yogi Berra (1925-2015) or the soccer star Johan Cruyff (1947-2016). As well as this summary about measures of career by Hoyt Wilhelm (1922-2002), who was a distinguished pitcher, here talking about his inclusion in Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame:
Records, yes, I’ve got a few of those too, but records are meant to be broken. If you’ve gone one that stands up, well you know that somebody might come along and break it. And then they might not, but that’s what baseball records are all about
But the Hall of Fame, that will be there forever.
In literature, there are prizes and sales and reviews, but immortality comes with recognition in selective history books, encyclopedias, and other compendia that will survive.
In my case, I treasure, notwithstanding professional disadvantages, individual entries on me in these books and websites:
Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers,
Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature,
Contemporary Poets,
Contemporary Novelists,
Postmodern Fiction,
Webster's Dictionary of American Writers,
The HarperCollins Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature,
Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians,
Directory of American Scholars,
and Britannica.com.
To the people selecting me for each repository, I’m grateful.
Don’t they constitute, not just individually but collectively, as close to a Hall of Fame that Literature has?