What Makes Classic Literature “Classic”?

A friend and I were discussing literature a while back, and she wondered why some books were counted as classics and others were not. So many of the bestsellers of ten years ago are not popular at all today. And I pick up fantastic books in old bookstores all the time — books that are extremely well-written, and that must have been popular at the time they were printed.

After a lot of thought, here’s what I think is required for a book to become a “classic.”

To be a “classic,” a book needs to address transcendent themes of human experience, to make a moral judgement about behaviour, and to offer an opportunity for personal improvement to both the characters in the book and to the reader. Characters in all “great” or “classic” literature are offered a choice of actions, and the consequences of their course of action, both in determining what choice to make and in following that course once chosen, teach deep eternal truth — that is, the stories have a clear purpose and a moral. It helps if the situations in which the characters find themselves are “universal” in nature — if they are situations in which any person of any time period might find themselves.

The test of time is also important. A book written 100 years ago that has nothing to say to me today cannot be a classic. Likewise, a book written last year, if it successfully addresses these eternal themes, may already be a classic, though it may not be categorized as one for 50 or 100 years. (I think of books like Gone With the Wind, or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Harry Potter series.)

Austen, Dickens, and Bronte address the follies and foibles of people enmeshed in a class- or caste- based socio-economic system, and they attack or ridicule the injustices and wickedness that human nature is prone to. Shakespeare explores the entire breadth of humankind; in his works you find every conceivable personality and type of person in situations designed to reveal both their strengths and their weaknesses. Steinbeck and Conrad dealt very forthrightly with the psychological aspects of human behaviour. The great Russians (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, for example) wrote of human responses to social and political injustice. The stories of O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant achieve the same effect in shorter formats.

Authors and works which do not address eternal verities in a scope or setting suitable to fully exploring them cannot ever be classics. They may be wildly popular for a while, but eventually their true nature will win out. Mere “brain candy,” like the modern romance novel, can only rarely achieve classic status. There is simply not enough substance to support them. That is not to say that non-classic literature has no place or value. There are times when I need “brain candy,” when I don’t need or want something thought-provoking or having deep significance, but when I need to read something that will let me escape from the world for a little while. There is a definite value there, even if the book I choose won’t ever be considered a “classic.”