The novel I assign to students when they claim they're bored by 'old books' is Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, published in 1937. It solves the problem of how to write in dialect without condescension — Hurston's narrative voice is in standard English but her characters speak in the vernacular of black Southern communities, and the gap between those registers is itself a subject.

Janie's narrative is a romance in the technical sense: it's about the formation of a self through love and loss and the development of a relationship between who you are and who the world expects you to be. What makes it a great novel rather than a good one is Hurston's understanding that the authentic self is not found but made, through exactly these kinds of experience.

The novel was out of print for decades and was recovered by Alice Walker, who wrote about finding it in the 1970s. The history of its suppression and recovery is worth reading about.