Excellent. 
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If Hollywood, big corporate, philosophy, (flash and cash) continues iindefinitely and further seeps into publishing we will just see books recycled, neverending. Coming this Fall… House of Leaves, the serial. Vol. Vl!!!
Yes, or at least teachers at some level will be the ones making it happen. Shakespeare wouldn’t be well known if every kid in every English-language school weren’t taught that he was the greatest writer in English ever.
I loved Grapes of Wrath, but the cynic in me says it’s too hard and long. Of Mice and Men will be assigned (just like in my high school we got Billy Budd when Moby Dick is the good one, or we got The Pearl because Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden are too long, and have dirty stuff, and Of Mice and Men is too violent).
Agreed, he suffers from the same lack of editorial balls that plagues J K Rowling’s later Harry books. But historically speaking, aren’t artists known for their best or most influential stuff? His later abortions will be forgotten, but his early stuff was quality crowd-pleasing fare. Hell, I’ve had three English teachers/professors cite his book On Writing as a must-read for aspiring writers. King produces a lot of crap, but when he feels like it, the man can write. He’s not merely limited to the horror tales that he favors most of the time; for instance, Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption is a fantastic story whose popularity was far eclipsed by the movie version.
The man does not pen high literature, but he’s a cultural phenomenon who has produced a crapton of stories, a lot of which have spoken to a shitton of people. Four movie adaptations of his books are in the IMDB Top 250, something which I’m pretty sure no other novelist can boast, and this includes the #1 spot for years. That’s not saying OMG HE’S THE BEST AUTHOR EVER (hell, I wouldn’t even put him on my top 20 list), but that he’s a uniquely significant one, and one that future generations may indeed pay attention to.
I haven’t read The Body, but if it’s half as good as Stand By Me then he gets a lifetime pass from me to write all the fellatory crap he wants.
The best characters are not created by the best writers, unfortunately. Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and James Bond will endure in popularity.
And I think future generations will have a much more positive assessment of JK Rowling than these boards have.
Rowling’s world is inspiring enough to stand the test of time, but I’m not sure if her writing is. But then again, many classics seem really badly written to me (David Copperfield, for one), so I definitely wouldn’t rule the Potter books out.
I don’t, and partly because she seems to get an awful lot of acclaim around here (in addition to some scorn, I admit.) I think at least part of her success was a marketing and right-time, right-place kind of thing. She wrote a kids’ book and then aged the characters at roughly the same pace her target audience aged. Brilliant, really. But will it stand the test of time? I personally think not. There are of course outliers, but HP, at its core, is very much a generational phenomenon, and I think it will fade a lot faster than people are expecting it to. In 30 years I think high school kids will still be reading Lord of the Rings, but Harry Potter, if acknowledged at all, will probably be regarded very lowly.
*Lord of the Rings
Of Mice and Men
The Maltese Falcon
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd *and many other mysteries. As Raymond Chandler noted in “The Simple Art of Murder,” the things that make mysteries popular are not going out of style.
I predict *I, Robot *by Isaac Asimov will continue to be read, not so much as great literature, but because his ideas of the Three Laws of Robotics will be influential and relevant as robotics advances as a science
I also predict that W.B. Yeats will continue to be read.
Modesty almost forbids me from mentioning it, but I hope to have my first novel finished soon.
Also, Sherlock Holmes wasn’t a 20th-Century creation. His first story appeared in something like 1888.
Marvel Comics did essentially the same thing during the 1960s, particularly with Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. Once they realized they weren’t going out of business in 1970, this stopped dead. I think these characters would have been much more highly regarded if they’d ceased publication when Ditko and Kirby quit.