Quote:
Originally Posted by Hamlet53
Not that I doubt your assertion I would ask what your working definition of classic was in making your statement. A book old enough to be in the public domain is not by definition a "classic," in fact few public domain books are classics. Patricia Clarke Memorial Library is a collection of public domain books, not classics.
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My definition was old enough to hit the 70 year mark and stood the test of time to still be relevant.
Generally they were books that stood the test of time to still be published and talked about. Of the books that hit the 70 years, only Dr. Izard was suspect enough to not be deemed classic. There's a few others that I might put into the non-classic, but these are not weak names in this list:
A Passage to India, E M Forster
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
Dracula, Bram Stoker
King Solomon's Mines, Rider Higgard
Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K Jerome
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie
The Trial, Franz Kafka
The Machine Stops, E M Forster
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Mysterious Island, Jules Verne
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
A Room with a View, E M Forster
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
The Island of Dr. Moreau, HG Wells
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
Tender is the Night, F Scott Fitzgerald
Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, Amelia Edwards
Carmilia, Sheridan LeFanu
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas
Dubliners, James Joyce
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Rema
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Man Who Would be King, Rudyard Kipling
The Cricket of the Hearth, Charles Dickens
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
West with the Night, Beryl Markham
There have been 10 Classic (and of the list above a couple of the less Classic ones (Verne) were for a Classic month), 2 MR Classic, and 2 PCML months.
I did not include some newer books that certainly fit as Classic as well, including Kurt Vonnegut and John Steinbeck.