Well, here's their dirty little secret: Many, if not most, of the books you were handed in high school as required reading were hated by critics and readers alike when they first hit shelves.

Raise your hand if you ever had to read a classic novel in school, only to come away hating it. And keep your hand up if at some point an adult turned up their nose at you for failing to recognize genius when you saw it.

6 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

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The Story You Know:

It's Aldous Huxley's chilling 1932 tale about a future centered upon sex, drug, and assembly-line worship, depicting humanity caught in an endless cycle of buying gizmos, working trivial jobs and taking drugs to make the depression go away.



Unfortunately, its main characters do not look this awesome.

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How Poorly it Was Received:

Critical reaction to Brave New World was "largely chilly," which is the short way of saying that it did to the literary world what Willy Wonka's boat ride did to your childhood.



Gaze into the face of madness.

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The result was an outright panic of literary criticism which resulted in the book getting universally panned, and ultimately selling only a few thousand copies upon its release in the U.S. Why? Everybody hated Huxley's vision of the future.

Even fellow futurists like H.G. Wells were shocked by the book's dystopian landscape. Despite being the same man who wrote War of the Worlds, Wells describe Brave New World's bleak future as "a betrayal." As for the book's more forgettable critics, i.e. everyone else, responses ranged from dismissal to childish name-calling.