Serious novelists start writing because of a desire to

I agree with option 'D'.

D it is. Clearly there is conflict here between best-selling literature and the literature that is a work of art. And this is clearly stated by D.

D for me too.

Tricky CR. I too picked "D", but with some hesitation.

My notes on this show:
Given: Serious novelist = write for works of art & can recognize other great novelists. If a novel is a best seller = not great literature.

Based on the given info, I would have guessed that the assumption is that if a work is a best seller, then the work (literature) is not good work.

Option D mirrored that response.

OA: D

I'm curious where the question is from, because it seems completely illogical (and badly written as well). There's an important distinction between intention and result, and the question confuses the two - it's a distinction that's discussed all the time in art criticism, the difference between a work's conception and a work's reception.

If something is an assumption in an argument, then it absolutely must be true to make the argument valid. Answer D is not necessarily required to make the conclusion valid; we don't need to assume that serious novelists believe that a bestselling author never intended to produce great literature. Instead, serious novelists they may think all authors try to produce great literature but that some fail, and instead sell a lot of books, and serious novelists, out of disdain for public opinion, might take a novel's bestselling status as prima facie evidence of the book's failure as great literature.

All of the answer choices are bad here.

this question is from peterson CAT.
I have got a similar response to few other peterson test questions which i posted here.
Peterson tests are not worth the time and effort.

peterson CAT.= waste of time.