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The average person in 1926 didn't and wouldn't read Hemingway either. The first print run of Sun Also Rises was 5000 copies. Most people didn't read much and a significant proportion couldn't read at all, and I suspect most of the silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared with much amateur YouTube content today

I suspect that in 100 years time, bestselling books particularly popular with today's tech addled brains will also be considered a bit dry and hard to relate to by the average reader.

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Hemingway was never JK Rowling, but he wasn't an obscure writer known only to academics and literature aficionados either. Your print run figure undersells his popularity quite a bit. "The Sun Also Rises" was his first novel when he was an unknown. Wikipedia goes on to say that it was on its 8th printing two years after publication.[0] This says that it had sold a million copies by 1961 [1]. The first edition of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was 75,000. [2]. "The Old Man and the Sea" was published in Life magazine, with a circulation of millions.[3]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises#Publication...

[1]: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/hemingway-ernest/....

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls#Backgr...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea#Backgr...

Hemingway was probably the best-known of the ex-pat Paris crowd during his lifetime. I expect some the Algonquin Roundtable writers may have been at least as equally well-known though as many wrote for popular magazines. Dorothy Parker's first volume of poetry sold 47,000 copies. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker

I certainly wouldn't claim Hemingway was obscure, but I don't see any of those figures undermining my point that the average person in 1926 wouldn't feel the inclination to read him over more digestible stuff (and the Bible) if they read at all.

Sure, the first eight print runs of The Sun Also Rises probably had a total circulation equivalent to the playthrough of some tediously-narrated niche videos on YouTube, and by 1961 when Hemingway was firmly established as a Great American Novelist it had as many copies over more than quarter of a century as Where the Crawdads Sing sells in a quarter, but I don't think you can infer anything much about attention spans from the appeal of literary fiction.

Agatha Christie is one of the bestselling authors of all time and I know my grandparents used to read her books while growing up in the 30's and 40's.

Those books have pretty good prose, it's perhaps not on the level of complexity of Hemingway (I've never read Hemingway so I couldn't say myself) but it is pretty complicated so I think there's definitely something to the argument that entertainment has 'dumbed down'.

5,000 copies was a lot for the time. The book was culturally significant, and Hemingway became a celebrity for the time. I think this was as close to a minor "influencer" someone could be back then:

> Still, the book sold well, and young women began to emulate Brett while male students at Ivy League universities wanted to become "Hemingway heroes." Scribner's encouraged the publicity and allowed Hemingway to "become a minor American phenomenon"—a celebrity to the point that his divorce from Richardson and marriage to Pfeiffer attracted media attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises#Reception

There's just no way a similar book written today could have this impact.

> I suspect most of the silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared with much amateur YouTube content today

I can't say what constituted "most film" in 1926 (are we going by what sold the most tickets? big blockbusters versus daily newsreels & cartoons?) but if you look at the era of 1925-1927 it includes Phantom of the Opera, Battleship Potemkin, The Vanishing American, The Bat, Metropolis, and Wings. Many of this list is iconic to this day to where they continue to be referenced & emulated in pop culture that many people recognize even if they haven't seen the originals before.

Granted this discussion will be hamstrung by how much film has been "lost" with so much of that content no longer in living memory at all (to say if it was masterpieces or crappy filler).

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