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Abstract: The article publishes the results of a preliminary study of applicability of the ethical category “reputation” to literary realities and the literary process. The publicity of literary activity makes the problem of the author’s reputation really important and up-to-date. Attention to the extra-literary side of the writer’s life was marked for the first time in the era of romanticism, and yet in the nineteenth century the text of a verse, poem and, especially, prose possessed the presumption of self-sufficiency. The situation fundamentally changed in the era of the Silver Age: in the twentieth century, not to mention the twenty-first, mankind was ruled by large, very large numbers, with which just letters, in whatever perfect order they might appear, can hardly compete. The letters themselves are too many. The world is drowning in an ocean of words flooding upon us from the pages of newspapers, magazines, books, from headphones, from TV screens, and, more recently, from computers. Modern politicians, journalists and propagandists try to shout the writer down. In these civilizational circumstances, the perception of a literary text more and more often becomes dependent on the personal-biographical context. The writer is now aware of himself not only as the author of his books, but also as the creator of his own literary self. The “spectacular” (B. Pasternak) understanding of the personality and biography of the writer turns out to be an inevitable response to both the entropy of the personal principle formed by historical reality, and to the transformation of literature into a profession. The texts now – first of all poetic and also prosaic ones – are either multiplied by the scale of the person or depreciated by that. In addition, the article draws attention to the reputational characteristics of such categories and realities as language, national literature, the nominations “writer” and “poet” period of literary history, genre, work, character name, literary prize and book series. The author’s theses are illustrated by examples from Russian and foreign literary practice of the 19th–20th centuries.