Historically speaking, the artistic "community" is typically a collection of untalented individuals who define the "Quality" of art in a way that preserves their political and social views. One of the results of this is that (quite often) there are countless artists who were considered among the best of their time that were rejected by the artistic "community" primarily because they held a contrarian view of the world.
Now, being that there are probably more books published in a year by American authors today than there was published (in total) before the 1950s, I haven’t read all of the books that have been written by American authors recently. I do believe that there are probably a fairly high number of really high quality authors being published in the United States today who might be ignored due to the high volume of books being published, or because they hold a worldview which is different from the artistic "community".
