What is the place of an author in intellectual history?

One very powerful purpose of literature is the author’s ability to solidify abstract ideas and philosophies. A ready example is the philosophy of Existentialism. While Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness explained existentialism quite thoroughly, it was the novels of Albert Camus (The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, etc.) that made it understandable to the reader layman. While “intellectual history” ranges over many years, the introduction of new ways of looking at the world can usually be narrowed down to the literary output of one or two authors – Ayn Rand and the moral justification of Free Enterprise, Erica Jong and sexual freedom, Jack Kerouac and post-modernism, etc. So the place of an author (fiction) in intellectual history is to bridge the gap between abstract idea and practical expression to the reading public in fictive and narratological form.