What makes a book a classic? Is it that it’s ageless? Are the characters more relatable than others? Who decides which books become classics? I do not have an answer to these questions because there is no right answer to what makes a book a classic.
By: Jessie Krehlik
News Editor
What makes a book a classic? Is it that it’s ageless? Are the characters more relatable than others? Who decides which books become classics? I do not have an answer to these questions because there is no right answer to what makes a book a classic.
According to guardian.co.uk, the top five books are Don Quixote, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels and Tom Jones. Newsweek disagrees. Their top five are War and Peace, 1984, Ulysses, Lolita and The Sound and the Fury. And Random House offers a different list as well: Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Lolita and Brave New World. Gregory Keresten, an English Literature major at Seton Hill University compiled his own list: “A Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserables, Journey to the West (not all classics are classics of the western world), Huckleberry Finn and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.” What can we learn from these lists? There is no universal “top classic novels” list for scholars to consult. It is all up to interpretation.
When I was in high school, I read The Catcher in the Rye because I heard so many great things about the story of Holden Caulfield, the rebel. And I hated every page. I hated everything about him. I do not understand why the book is even considered to be a classic, but I still acknowledge that it is. Perhaps it’s the fact that there is at least one Holden Caulfield in every high school in America. Or maybe it was the era in which J. D. Salinger was writing his compelling story. Whatever the reason, that little brat will forever be idolized by every rebel teenager who reads his story.
Is it the way in which a book is written? Or is it that different characters are easier to relate to for different people? Maybe that’s what sets classics apart from other novels. Look at A Tale of Two Cities. That book had the best first and last line of any book I’ve ever read, and the middle was okay. But, for whatever reason, those two lines really did make the story. That first line drags readers in, and that last line stays with readers even after they’ve finished the book.
What about The Lord of the Rings? There are no specific lines I would quote from Tolkien, but I would say that his writing style is spectacular. Aside from his style, Tolkien has other weapons in his arsenal as well. He creates characters that are so relatable that readers grow eager to find out what happens next, and his themes of greed and the lust for power are elements that really are timeless. People will always be power hungry, so they can identify with Frodo’s struggle to do the right thing.
Dracula is another great example of a “classic.” Stoker created fear in the hearts of his readers when he created a story told by only letters. He created suspense by leaving his readers in the dark as he wandered from point of view to point of view, and yet again, the characters (aside from Dracula) were very relatable.
On that note, let me go back to The Catcher in the Rye for a moment. Perhaps the reason I hated the book so much was because I could not bring myself to identify with Holden. One of my best guy friends in high school thought Holden was the greatest character of all literary history. I doubt he would have identified with the young girl in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn like I did though. This is key. What one person might consider the worst book ever could be a treasure to someone else.
What will be a classic 50 years from now? Harry Potter? Twilight? The Time Traveler’s Wife? J.K. Rowling took the world by storm with her dynamic characters, but girls all over the world also fell in love with both Edward and Jacob in Stephanie Meyer’s books. Will Henry and Clare’s story literally stand the test of time? All we can do is wait and see. Some scholars might argue that Rowling’s books are already considered classics, but at the same time others might disagree.
Even though I still do not have an answer for what qualifies a book as a classic, here’s five books that I have read—so far—that I consider to be classics: To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Fahrenheit 451, Dracula and The Once and Future King. The order does not matter. What matters is that these books spoke to me, as well as countless others. They might not be on anyone else’s top five books, but they’re on mine. They are part of a unique list compiled by yet another unique individual.