Defining Classics

What would define a classic to you? How does a novel become given 'classic status' and why so?

Any thoughts?

Simple answer: a work which is generally recognised as having significant, enduring worth.
Complicated answer: see any of the "what is a classic?" threads in this group and elsewhere...

No-one can ever agree what particular group of people qualify for the "generally considered" part (we all define it in one way or another as "the people whose opinion I take seriously"), or how long it has to be around before we can say that it is "enduring" (five years? fifty? a century?), or how egregious something has to be to be considered "significant".

ETA: Of course, there are also those who say that "classic" status is a purely objective property of the work, and not subject to the vagaries of critical opinion, and there are publishers who use the term "classic" for anything in the back-catalogue that still sells (or, alternatively, for any work whose copyright has expired).

I ran across this quote this afternoon:

"Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them."
- Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?

Influence. Has the book changed the world, or at least literature? Gone With The Wind is not particularly well written, but how the average American 'remembers' the antebellum South is colored by that novel. There are many other such books, which are not great literature but have affected popular culture, or history.

Very true. By reading them we personally find their own value.

Wish I could remember the source of the quote, but one I remember goes something like "A classic is a novel which continues to speak its message, regardless the passage of time or number of readings." From that I get the qualities ageless and eloquent.

>6 Cecrow:
I have a voicemail system that does that :-)

An online book group that I belong to recently included a book first published in 1987 in a "Classics" group read.

I had a strong visceral response that this was wrong but had a difficult time expressing why (other than knee-jerk reaction that it isn't old enough). What do you all think?

>8 leslie.98: I think it takes time for a book to prove itself a 'classic'. Sometimes a book is popular and widely acclaimed in it's day, but after awhile it appears dated or overrated. But 1987 was about 25 years ago, so I think enough time has passed that a fair assessment can be made as to whether it is really a 'classic'.

By the way, what book was it, if we may ask?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was liable to be considered an author of classics in his day, for his bestselling novels. Now we just make fun of him. "It was a dark and stormy night ...."

>9 madpoet: The book was Crossing to Safety by Stegner.

>11 leslie.98: Ah! Wallace Stegner is the author of Angle of Repose, which was on the Modern Library's list of the '100 best novels of the 20th Century'. Maybe because of the author some people consider it automatically a classic. I haven't read it, though, so I can't say.

I don't think you can make an absolute rule for number of years.

There's always the subjective effect of how "classic" the work is in relation to my lifetime: It feels premature now to call something that I read as an adult 25 years ago a classic, but as a child I certainly read books written about the same number of years earlier (e.g. Arthur Ransome, C.S. Lewis, Erich Kästner) whose classic status I wouldn't have doubted for a moment.

Genre plays a role too: Lord of the rings and Dancer from the dance are probably total irrelevancies seen in the bigger picture of literary history, and are too recent to be established as classics in any absolute sense. They will probably be forgotten in a generation or two when their respective genres have passed out of sight, but as long as there are still people who are interested in fantasy or in LGBT writing they will be seen as classic founding works of those genres.

>13 thorold: "It feels premature now to call something that I read as an adult 25 years ago a classic, but as a child I certainly read books written about the same number of years earlier (e.g. Arthur Ransome, C.S. Lewis, Erich Kästner) whose classic status I wouldn't have doubted for a moment. "

I guess it is the being published in my adult years that makes it feel contemporary rather than classic to me.

But you are right that there can't be any absolute rule. All the definitions above contain subjective terms ("significant", "influential", "worth") so I suppose the underlying message here is we each have to decide for ourselves what books are classics!

>14 leslie.98:, inevitably as we age, we'll see reprints of novels we clearly remember when they were first published, now with the word 'classic' attached to their covers on the new edition. A sure sign we're being put out to pasture.

>13 thorold: I don't think Lord of the Rings will be forgotten anytime soon. It's already been around for-- what-- 60 years? And it's still read for pleasure.

Here was Italo Calvino's magnificent attempt at a definition:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/oct/09/why-read-the-classics/

>17 Cecrow: Thanks for the link. That was a very rewarding time-out.

Personally, when I think of a classic, I think of a work whose theme and intent won't lose relevance over time. I've always wondered personally whether or not The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger was a classic. I read it myself at the target age and I found it well-written, but quite irrelevant for my generation. Would you consider The Catcher in the Rye a classic?

"(C i t R) . . . quite irrelevant for (our) generation" . . ."

True, "Holden Caulfield" is very much a youth "of his own time". So also is David Copperfield whom Holden semi-disparages in his first paragraph. So are Tom Jones and "Roderick Random" and "Elizabeth Bennett". Does that mean
we can get no insight from them, either? The very fact that I name all of the above in the present tense shows that I automatically think of them as "Classic" and therefore living.
If I heard someone say, e.g., Tom Jones WAS a lovable rogue." I would think
"Come on, heʻs a fictional character!"; are you trying to make him sound historical?
If they said "Tom Jones IS a lovable rogue," I would just nod a perfunctory agreement.

#20> You can add Huck Finn to your list, as well. That's by way of agreeing with your post.

I think Holden Caulfield just isn't contemporary anymore. Even reading Catcher back in the 80s, I thought that. Still, dated but not irrelevant.

Some coming of age stories have not stood the test of time so well. Does anyone read Tom Brown's Schooldays anymore? Or S.E. Hinton's novels, for that matter: The Outsiders and That was then, this is now

#22> For what it's worth, I had a teenager come into my used bookstore just the other day looking for S.E. Hinton books that he wanted to reread. Happily, I had a couple of old, inexpensive paperbacks to sell him.

Like pornography, you know it when you see it.

>24 Urquhart: Yeah, but not everyone agrees on what is pornography, either. Ulysses was once considered pornographic, remember.

I can't define a classic, but I can give it 3 characteristics (which I created myself!):
1. has withstood the test of time (50+ years)
2. it is a work of superior quality as evidenced by peers and awards
3. it is for all people (nationalities, races) of all ages (time periods).

I personally think that anything that's under fifty years old isn't old enough to make "classic" status yet. :)

Even then it only gets us back to 1965. How many of these top ten US bestsellers for that year can we call classics today? Saul Bellow has a shot, maybe.

1. The Source, James A. Michener 900 copies on LT

2. Up the Down Staircase, Bel Kaufman 369 copies

3. Herzog, Saul Bellow 1,334 copies

4. The Looking Glass War, John Le Carré 439 copies

5. The Green Berets, Robin Moore 57 copies

6. Those Who Love, Irving Stone 113 copies

7. The Man with the Golden Gun, Ian Fleming 469 copies

8. Hotel, Arthur Hailey 244 copies

9. The Ambassador, Morris West 50 copies

10. Don't Stop the Carnival, Herman Wouk 147 copies

Thank you, Bestsellers Over the Years Group
http://www.librarything.com/topic/33541

>28 Cecrow: Thanks for the list! It is interesting to see how many bestsellers fade with time. These discussions and my own experience are two of the reasons I tend to be wary of the "in" books that everyone seems to be reading.

On that list, I would count Herzog as a classic. Some of the other authors I might include but not for those specific books (Wouk for example -- I would count The Winds of War as a classic but don't know this title).

#28> But I don't think I'd use the best seller list as anything but a very preliminary starting point when looking for classics from any relatively modern era.

Also published in 1965:
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Arial by Sylvia Plath
God Bless You Mrs. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
The Magus by John Fowles
Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Conner
Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown
Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal
Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen

We could agree or disagree about how many of those are classics, but most of them have greater claim to that status than any on the best seller list with the exception of Bellow. Also, I personally have no problem considering those early Le Carre books classics. Some people automatically eliminate "genre fiction," but I am not in that camp.

Source here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/popular_by_date/1965