Classics Don’t Always Make the ‘Classics’ List

Here are 20th-century novels that shy away from doom and gloom.

"Reading by the Sea," 1910, by Vittorio Matteo Corcos. Public Domain

In my years of teaching Advanced Placement English Literature to seminars of homeschooling students, several times, students asked me, “Mr. Minick, why are so many of the novels we read so depressing?”

The novels in question were standard titles taken from the AP list and ones I happened to admire, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.”