Toni Morrison's fiction conveyed much of the pain, sacrifice and trauma that exemplifies so much of the African-American experience—which is why it makes some white readers uncomfortable.
Powers’s chosen subjects—in cassocks or nay—are inevitably All-American, and his stories are careful studies of American mid-century life and ambition.
Evelyn Waugh's reputation has endured for almost a century as other novelists have fallen out of fashion. It wasn't because everyone thought him a jolly fellow.