Are there any new classic novels since 1960?

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empther

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I was thinking, always a dangerous thing! 😃

You have Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Moby Dick, Gone With the Wind, and many other classics.

The most recent classic I can think of is To Kill A Mockingbird, published in 1960.

Are there any other classics since 1960 ?
 
Might be kind of an oxymoron “new classics.” Typically, it takes awhile for a book to firmly establish itself as a “classic.”
 
Beloved by Toni Morrison
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
Ken Kesey
A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Douglas Adams
 
Right now, I’m reading A Game of Thrones (part of the series "A Song of Ice and Fire) by George R.R. Martin, who is nicknamed “the American Tolkien”.
 
Amazon bestselling rank in “books”

To Kill A Mockingbird #23 … :eek: … 👍 … 😃
Catch 22 #516
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest #583
The Graduate #91,000
Deliverance #67,892
The Right Stuff #5,477
 
empther said:
Amazon bestselling rank in “books”
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Classic novels have withstood the test of time for generations, rather than a decade or two.
With a generation being 20 years, it’s hard to show that more recent works have stood the test of time, even if we personally really like them, or if they have a relatively high ranking on Amazon.🙂
May God bless all who visit this thread.
Amen.
 
JackVk said:
Right now, I’m reading A Game of Thrones (part of the series "A Song of Ice and Fire) by George R.R. Martin, who is nicknamed “the American Tolkien”.
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I hadn’t heard that. Is he also Catholic and writing out of an implicit Catholic worldview or is the comparison just on the level of his style and subject matter?
 
PietroPaolo said:
I hadn’t heard that. Is he also Catholic and writing out of an implicit Catholic worldview or is the comparison just on the level of his style and subject matter?
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I believe (having read both) the only comparison is on the level of “historic” background of his fictional world and the multiple characters (though many more in GoT) that have ongoing developing plot lines.

JMO - I’d add these two to the “if not yet a classic, should at least be considered as a potential future one”

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (1987)
Night by Elie Wiesel (1982)
Inherit the Stars by James P Hogan (1978) (in the sci-fi category)
 
I’m not sure about classics, but a few celebrated writers whose works are worth investigating are Phillip Roth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Nicholas Baker to name a few. Obviously it’s hard to tell what’s a classic the closer you are to the time period in which the novel was written. It takes time and perspective for a book to be anointed a classic and also literary fortunes wax and wane.
 
We won’t know if something stands the test of time until 50-100 years later. The only way to know is if a large percentage of readers are still reading it and analyzing it that many years later. If there are fewer classic books these days, that might just be because of the new forms of media we have. The more forms of media invented, the more spread out the population’s creative energy. In addition to books and music, we now have television, film, and interactive experiences (see “Art game” on Wikipedia). There will likely be even more “new media” invented in the years to come. Also, the number of artistic advances in media over time start out extremely fast and then slow down greatly. When something is new, innovation is rapid. Then most of the “easy” discoveries have been found, and it is very rare when a new one appears.
 
empther said:
I was thinking, always a dangerous thing! 😃

You have Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Moby Dick, Gone With the Wind, and many other classics.

The most recent classic I can think of is To Kill A Mockingbird, published in 1960.

Are there any other classics since 1960 ?
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I’m afraid that there aren’t that many nowadays. In fact, it has been a while since I’ve managed to read a really good novel. The novels made these days, including the ones geared for teenagers, just bore me.

But that’s just my opinion, and I cannot be sure if there are any good titles from self publishing.
 
A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Miller,

The First Circle, and One Day in the Life of Evan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn, in the 1960s.

The Once and Future King, by White, in 1958. (close enough to 1960s?)

Dune by Herbert, 1965

And Ladies of the Club, by Santmyer, 1982

As for what “classic novel” means, I would say that a novel is “classic” when a high school English teacher makes it required reading for the class! All of the above qualify!

There are so many more!
 
I think a “classic” novel is one that has a universal theme about the human condition.

For example: Tale Of Two Cities makes the reader question how he would act in the situations described. Would I be Sydney Carton and take somebody’s place at the guillotine?

In Moby Dick, Captain Ahab confronts the unfairness of life and responds badly. Would I do better?

In contrast, we have a book like The Graduate. The recent college grad doesn’t know what to do with his life. The movie was a hit because this theme struck home with us young guys. OK, but is it a universal theme of the human condition? Is it a necessary rite of passage problem? Not really. Many young people know exactly what they’ll do with their lives. The son of a small business owner will take over his father’s business. The high school Senior girl will marry her longtime boyfriend.

To Kill A Mockingbird was about racial prejudice. This is a question everybody must face at some time. It’s universal.
I suspect people considered TKAM a classic soon after it was published.

In recent decades with the rise of the media, especially television, the competition for getting people’s attention has intensified. Gone are the days when everybody rushed out to buy a copy of Gone with the Wind. Now, writers, and movie producers, must zero in on specific themes of specific audiences. So The Graduate zeroed in on the youth wondering about what to do with their lives. Older people probably wondered what this junk was about.
It’s gotten worse in recent years. Now we have movies like Spiderman, Transformers and the like where themes seem to have been abandoned altogether. You have to razzle-dazzle the audience to get their attention.

People today have seen everything. They’re so jaded, any work of art with a universal theme would be rejected as being “preachy”.

The age of new classic novels may be over. 😦
 
I’m going to agree with those who say we won’t know for another 50-100 years. Any book published in 1960 has barely passed that test. I think it would probably be easier to list newer classic movies, video games, or animation, since those mediums are younger- each work has a larger effect on the medium as a whole, and that influence is something that allows new works to be declared relatively “classic” sooner.
Cat said:
A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Miller,

The Once and Future King, by White, in 1958. (close enough to 1960s?)
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So those two are really good? I have them sitting in a pile on my desk… Maybe I should go read them…? >.>
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empther:
I think a “classic” novel is one that has a universal theme about the human condition.
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I think that’s too lenient. There are lots of stories that aren’t particularly good, complex, noteworthy, or influential, but they still have a pretty basic, universal theme. I mean, pretty much anything can have a universal theme if that theme is defined broadly enough.

For instance- you say that To Kill a Mockingbird is about racial prejudice. Fair enough. If that’s a universal theme, then Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (from 1975) must also be a classic, since it and its sequels also center on racial prejudice, and deal with that theme more directly than TKaM does. Or maybe they aren’t, if we’re going to say that they deal with the racial prejudice specific to the Southern US in the 1930s, which isn’t something everyone can relate to.

The same issue happens when you talk about the themes of the other books you list. Moby Dick is definitely a classic- but a good 50% of the pages have nothing to do with the theme, and arguably the story. The whole thing is packed with essays about whaling, which is something very few modern readers can relate to. They’ll learn a lot from reading it, but there’s a good chance that it won’t resonate with them precisely because the story is completely outside their experience. Ditto with Pride and Prejudice, which could be said to be about, well, the effects of pride and prejudice, but one could also argue that it’s nothing more than a well-put-together romance novel (and a lot of modern audiences treat it accordingly).

On the other hand, if we define themes more broadly, I could probably argue that the Animorphs series (from the 90s) deals with the universal theme of responsibility, and prompts its readers to consider the difference between what we dream of (in this case, having superpowers) and how things would turn out if we got our wish (the Animorphs’ lives are destroyed because they must take full responsibility for protecting the earth). You could, in turn, say that it has no theme, and it’s merely a pointless story about kids fighting aliens. Neither one of us would be totally right- Animorphs does have themes, and it does ask a lot of tough questions of its young readers. Regardless, the books are not classics, and will be largely forgotten as soon as their original readers die.

The whole thing is kind of a weird question, given that there’s really a spectrum between a definite classic (say, the works of Shakespeare) and something that’s definitely not a classic (say, Twilight). Most popular works fall somewhere in the middle. The Nancy Drew books are still being read 50 years after being published, but they’re clearly not classics of the same caliber as Hamlet.
It’s gotten worse in recent years. Now we have movies like Spiderman, Transformers and the like where themes seem to have been abandoned altogether. You have to razzle-dazzle the audience to get their attention.
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The ironic thing is that by your own definition, the Spiderman cartoons qualify as classics (I don’t know anything about the movies). The theme of most of them is that “with great power comes great responsibility”, which is very universal. I would also say that Spiderman is some kind of classic character- he’s got a lot of influence, and has remained a popular figure for upwards of fifty years- although it’s difficult to argue that any single Spiderman comic, cartoon, or movie is “a classic”.

Superhero stories in general mirror mythology in some ways, with the same story being told over and over in different ways, and many conflicting accounts of what happened to the same heroic character. The popular ones are long-lasting cultural icons (almost everyone has heard of Batman and Superman, whose stories were first published in the 30s and 40s). I wouldn’t be so quick to count them as nothing but “razzle-dazzle”. 😉
 
Kamaduck said:
I’m going to agree with those who say we won’t know for another 50-100 years. Any book published in 1960 has barely passed that test. I think it would probably be easier to list newer classic movies, video games, or animation, since those mediums are younger- each work has a larger effect on the medium as a whole, and that influence is something that allows new works to be declared relatively “classic” sooner.

So those two are really good? I have them sitting in a pile on my desk… Maybe I should go read them…? >.> ?QUOTE]

Oh, yes, you should! 🙂
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I think The Listener by Taylor Caldwell has good potential for being a classic, although the audience is more limited than some others. It has a timeless quality abut it, so that one does not realize how long ago it was written.
 
Gosh, I totally forgot to mention “100 Years of Solitude” by Marquez and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

I don’t know if these really will be considered classics, but many, many people considered them more or less instant classics when they were published. Also in the case of “100 Years” it was also a huge popular success (I don’t know about “Midnight”).

These are definitely two books that like them or not changed the paradigm for what was considered literature. (“The English Patient” by Michael Ondaatje - another one to consider.) They spawned an enormous number of imitators. That could be one indication of a future classic.
 
It did disappoint me to see this (though I had already seen that quote on Wikipedia long before this). Ice and Fire is much more political and morally ambiguous (but not relativistic, per se) than LOTR. I do like that, because our world, tainted by Original Sin, isn’t going to be as cut-and-dry as Tolkien portrayed it. Martin allows most of the characters to tell their side of the story.

Also, Ice and Fire is easier to read than many of Tolkien’s works, mostly because the chapters are short and not written in Elvish 😛 .
 
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