Let It Grow by Eric Beetner

 What “great literary influence” do you secretly think is overrated—but are afraid to say publicly?

It’s been a fascinating thing to watch my two daughters navigate through high school and see what the reading assignments were. I was dismayed to see that the standard curriculum hadn’t changed much since I was in high school in the mid-80s. 

I had to hear endlessly about how bad The Old Man And The Sea was. How The Great Gatsby was “meh”. How To Kill A Mockingbird wasn’t as good as the movie.

It becomes a slippery slope when discussing literature of any kind because I feel the need to acknowledge that books written in the 1800s simply don’t have the relevance to readers in the 21st century, while at the same time accepting the universality of certain story tropes and themes and basic human emotions in those same books. I think everyone should have a decent working knowledge of Shakespeare, if only because so many cultural reference still abound about his works. Do I think they have the same impact, as written, in 2026 as they did back then or even a hundred years ago? Not even close. They’re nearly impenetrable with a Gen Z reader.

Language evolves, and it should. More often than not those who lament over changing grammatical standards or newly invented slang creeping into common usage will also cling to the language of their youth, ignoring that their version of "correct" language is a product of change. If you tried to go around speaking in iambic pentameter because you felt that was the truest expression of the English language, then you would miss out on language’s primary goal: to be understood.

All that is to say, I think most of the “great” novels that are still studied and handed out to students in both the high school and collegiate level are overrated. You will still find young readers identifying with Holden Caulfield, but they would also love The Perks Of Being A Wallflower. Jane Austen fans would probably also love Wolf Hall. Frankenstein can be a slog, but if you want horror than it relevant than look at the work Stephen Graham Jones is doing these days, or recent Pulitzer winner Daniel Kraus. 

Any number of 21st century novels can claim just as much literary relevance as something 200 years old, and will likely speak more to a young reader’s experience and therefore make them more invested than, say, hunting for a white whale in 1840.

I find counterculture novels fall out of relevance quite quickly since they speak so much to the times in which they were written. Sorry, On The Road. Similarly, Hunter S. Thompson was fun to read when I was 20, but even then it was a relic of the past. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test seems like a cautionary tale these days and not a call to action. And Howl is just too damn long and someone should have said it back then.

And maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t put quite so much stock in writers who were being paid by the word. Dickens can get a little wordy, and there’s a reason. Or writers who had literally nothing else to do during a long Russian winter except muse about War and Peace for 1200 pages.

Just as writing evolves, language changes and reacts to a dynamic world and different times, so should our examples of “great” or “Important” writing. To exclude modern-day writers is to cheat readers out of that one book that will make them fall in love with words. Talk to any high schooler and they’ll tell you in florid language how much and how often assigned reading killed any love of reading. And when you kill it young, it often never grows back.