This month’s question from The Classics Club is a great one! I’ve struggled with many of the other questions and this one wasn’t any different. I loved the reflection required and as with the other questions asked so far, I’ve looked outside of what I’ve read for the club to find an answer, but perhaps not the answer. This month the moderators have asked us
What is your favorite “classic” literary period and why?
For me it’s hard to explain as geography/location/setting plays a bigger role in books for me than time period, but I realized that a lot of the books I thoroughly enjoy that qualify as classics are from the mid 1900s, but not the standard books. I was thinking along the lines of Bastard Out of Carolina, The Color Purple, To Kill A Mockingbird and anything by Carson McCullers and Truman Capote.
These novels speak to me more from their setting, incredibly poor, rural, southern communities, but they are all mostly set within the early to mid 1900s. But then you add in books like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and that expands from the south, but still includes poor communities. What’s funny is that in general, when it comes to the classics, I prefer the stalwarts of Britain and France, but clearly the modern books that often deal with poverty when other portions of the country prosper, fascinate me