The Temptation of Saint Anthony

One mark of a great writer must be the willingness to write a bad book. It makes sense that writers who push themselves and their projects to the limits of the feasible would occasionally overstep in one direction or another. In this category, I think the greatest bad books must belong to Gustave Flaubert, a writer so wary of writing the same novel twice that instead he took each book as an opportunity to reinvent the entire genre. Madame Bovary (1857) is, obviously, a great book, and Three Tales (1877) and Sentimental Education (1869). Bouvard and Pecuchet (1881) is to my mind the greatest of them all—but not all of them are great. Salammbo (1862) is not great, although the idea of it is great. But The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874)—that's my pick for a bad book. His friends told him to hide it away, not to publish it, and while it's tempting to romanticize any negative reception of a great artist, in this case I think they were right. It just isn't a good book.