Both Dewey for Windows and WebDewey in CORC contain a built number, 813.6, with the caption "American fiction--2000-." When should this number be used? Is it related to the author's year of birth or the date of publication of the work being classified?

The answer to your query can be found in the Manual entry that has the caption "Table 3-A. Subdivisions for Works by or about Individual Authors" which begins on page 936 of volume 4 of the print edition of DDC 21. It reads in part as follows:

Literary periods

Only one literary period is used for an author and all of the author's works, including works that may have been published earlier or later than the literary period. The literary period is determined in accordance with scholarly consensus about when an author flourished. Thus an author commonly regarded as an early 19th century writer is classed as such, even if the author published literary works at the end of the 18th century. If the period when an author flourished cannot be determined, use the date of the author's earliest known separate literary publication, disregarding magazine contributions, isolated student works, and juvenilia.

New periods are used for authors whose first published work appears during or after the year that opens the period. Thus you should keep an eye out for works by newly published authors--first novels, first collection of poems, etc.--and give them 21st-century numbers. For this purpose we make it easy for librarians by disregarding periodical publications, and wait to establish the period until there is a published work with the author's name on it. The reality of gradual transitions from one literary period to the next is reflected by the fact that the classification of contemporary literature for the next several years will be dominated by late 20th-century authors: Only after a decade or so will we have a significant literature in 21st-century period notation.

Our current guideline goes back a long way, but it is not applied retroactively. For authors of earlier years we simply accept the decisions of classifiers of long ago. Your best bet for earlier authors is to follow copy, e.g., from sources like WorldCat, the OCLC Online Union Catalog.

Last revised: 09 January 2004