PittTrib: Today's fiction... tomorrow's classics?

What turns today's fiction into tomorrow's classics? - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review : "Rowling's work is by no means great literature. I'll buy that the Potter books are stories well told, but they do not have the majestic sweep of Tolkien's work or the moral gravitas of Lewis' writing.

Before hordes of Potter fans descend upon me on their Quidditch sticks, I'm not demonizing Rowling in anyway. Turning hundreds of thousands, if not a few million, children into readers is a remarkable feat; for that alone she deserves all the riches that come her way.

I just don't think she's met the qualifications for great literature, which to me is a work that tells us something about the lives and times of a period. That's the stuff of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Willa Cather and Nathaniel Hawthorne, of Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler.

Which leads me to wonder, who among contemporary writers will endure? Whose work will be read well into the 22nd century and beyond?"