What is a classic & Daddy-Long-Legs

Daddy Long Legs
By Jean Webster
A+ for excellence :O)


Classics are good books. I totally agree with Bumbles from Quirky Girls Read (http://quirkygirlsread.wordpress.com/the-classic-bribe/) about the lure of Classic things. However, not a lot of people realize that, and think classics are: old fashioned, boring, and most of all, long. But classics do not have to be three hundred years old for people to say, "Oh, that's a classic." And not all three hundred year old books are called classics. So many people would ask, "What exactly is a classic?"




A classic is a book that doesn't age over time. A lot of people don't really know what this means. "How could a book not age?" they ask. But it's rather simple. If it doesn't grow old, it doesn't age. If you have a joke that you keep repeating, then people will say, "That's getting old, you know." Then you know they're tired of that joke. But if a book doesn't get old, that means nobody ever tires to hear it read, or read it themselves. They want to read it over and over again. But of course, if your book was published only yesterday, even if you love to read it over and over again, you have to wait. See if it lasts over time. Maybe in six months you'll dislike that book.
Daddy Long Legs is an excellent example of one such book. It is about a girl named Jerusha Abbott, who has lived up to the age of eighteen at the John Grier Home, an old fashioned orphanage, where she has been sent to the village school, and with nowhere else to go, continues working at her old home. One day, she is called to the room of Mrs. Lippett, the strict boss of the Home, and is suddenly informed that one of the Home's trustees, a mysterious person who refused to be known and insisted to be referred to as Mr. John Smith, thought she had good potential to be a writer and offered to pay for her college education as well as thirty five dollars a month allowance in return for a letter every month addressed to Mr. John Smith. Jerusha has only seen a dark silhouette of him, a glance at the irregular stranger, and since she saw he had long legs, she began to call him Daddy Long Legs instead of Mr. John Smith in her letters and signing her name the illustrious "Judy."