I’ve been wondering about this. Colleen Hoover is well known as the sort of poster girl for sloppily written, baffling and aggressively mediocre books.
What was the equivalent to her in previous times? Like the Romantic or Modernist period?
During the the 1890s, what book was considered “embarassing” or super low brow to be caught with (in the same way the book community largely treats It Ends With Us)?
A good way to find these authors: Wikipedia has lists of bestselling books in the US for every year from 1895 to the present.
Looking through the lists, for example, from 1900-1910, you see a few kinds of books:
Books by authors who are still more or less famous (Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Arthur Conan Doyle).
Books you only recognise because someone made a film (The Virginians, The Clansman).
Books by writers who are obscure but well regarded by academic specialists in that period (Mary Cholmondeley, George Barr McCutcheon).
Everything else. A lot of the “everything else” will be by the kind of writer you’re looking for.
Don’t read these, you’ll get depressed after the 1950s.