English/American Must-Read Classic Books

Cello--

Welcome to A2K.

I assume when you say "classic" you mean beloved books that represent popular culture rather than books that are taught in school?

Hi, Noddy24, thanks for the welcome. I guess classic could mean both meanings.

Cello--

Shakespeare is a classic English author. Agatha Christie is a popular writer.

As a current popular writer--who may well become a classic--I recommend Terry Pratchett. His fantasy universe, Discworld, offers home ground for satirizing Western Civilization.

You should read Jane Austen.

I'll second Jespah on that one . . .

Additionally, one of the best glimpses of life in late Victorian and in Edwardian England is "The Forsyte Saga," a series of novels by John Galsworthy. Not to be confused with a classic which deserves the title based on the literary excellence (such as the works of Austen, Dickens or Eliot), it is a classic because of its dissection of the English middle class commoner, who, in that period of English history, grew to greater real prominence, and the conduct of affairs public and private, than the aristocracy and the monarchy. Essentially, it concerns the private lives and marital affairs of Soames Forsyte and "Young" Jolyon Forsyte. The stories are ramified in a couple of other novels which concern peripheral characters who are not themselves Forsytes, but related to them through marriage, and thereby carry the "saga" into the interwar period. I highly recommend this series of novels. To put it in other terms, these novels do for the golden age of middle class English, in far fewer books of course, what Zola's Rougon-Macquart series did for the Second Empire.

Otherwise, the list of classics in English-language literature runs to literally thousands of volumes--from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Piers Plowman to William Faulkner or Aldous Huxley.

Mark Twain.

Thank you very much, everyone, for your suggestions.

I have seen movies based on books of Jane Austen, I like them, Jespah, and they have a very nice British accent.

Tailbone, Mark Twain is very famous but I have not read him yet. I feel so lacking in my English reading.

That series you mentioned looks interesting, Setanta. I like Zola and the comparison helps. Gee, thousands of classics!!! I would never have imagined that.

Noddy, I thought Agatha Christie's books were classics just because they are so popular over the years. Now I know the difference. Thanks for pointing it out.

Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter or House of The Seven Gables
Thoreau - Walden Pond
Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
Melville - Moby Dick (or you could accept a date with Kickycan and he will tell you all about it)
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby or at least his short stories
Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea, or For Whom The Bell Tolls
(Personally, I don't care much for Hemingway and usually prefer the Hollywod versions of his books)
Pearl S. Buck - The Good Earth

More recent American authors to check out - Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller,
Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates.

That should keep me busy for a while. Thanks, Green Witch. Saw Moby Dick on TV, the version with the Star Trek Captain, it was pretty good.