Famous Classics - are they famous during their time?

Kate Chopin was popular in her time until she released The Awakening which ended her career. I actually just wrote a book analysis about it last week for English Comp 2. I had not known who she was until I had to find a controversial book to write about. I’m so glad I picked that book, I loved it. Her short stories are wonderful too.

Higgins said:

But they liked Tom Sawyer? Was that earlier? Why the problem with Huck? I always thought Huck's narrative voice was one of the best ever.

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True. I think the problem was that people expected Huckleberry Finn to be a sequel to Tom Sawyer, mostly a humorous tale, like the products of current humorists such as Josh Billings and Bill Nye. From an introduction by Henry Nash Smith:

"On the other hand, readers who prided themselves on being refined considered these humorists rather vulgar. When the Concord Library Committee characterized Huckleberry Finn as 'the veriest trash,' the denunciation was widely echoed in the press."

I think it was Mark Twain who defined a classic as a book that "people praise, but don't read."

As others have mentioned, MOBY-DICK was a bomb in its time ("who wants to read all those chapters about whaling?") but is the quintessential American classic today.

H.P. Lovecraft also toiled in relative obscurity in his time, but was just celebrated with a volume of his own in the Library of America series -- a sign that he, too, has entered the realm of classic.