MORE ON MOORE

It’s not surprising that “nobody” in America has heard of Brian Moore (“An Irishman in Malibu,” by Tom Christie, March 1), arguably one of the greatest living masters of English-language fiction.

Recently, at a sizable gathering of California intelligentsia, peppered with entertainment-industry executives pontificating about the bad quality of scripts these days, a truly literate writer friend bet me a dollar that there wasn’t one person there who could name three novels by Thomas Mann. My friend, winning the bet with shameful ease, then magnanimously offered double-or-nothing that the same challenge would get the same result even if the authors posed were Conrad, Dostoevsky and James. Again my friend won, even though the challenge was only to name the novels, not to have actually read them.

Finally, after discovering that not a single person present could name three novels even by Faulkner or Melville, I gave up. But I learned something: One could easily go broke overestimating the literacy of the American people.

DAVID STOUGHTON

Santa Monica