One of the problems with some of the "classics" we remember is that other people have mined them for inspiration. For example, I've been told that if you come to Lord of the Rings after Harry Potter then Gandalf can seem like Dumbledore clone.
Tolkien and Lovecraft - both ground breakers in their day - have been mined so much that today some people think they ripped off others. It's always terrible then the ground breaker is accuss of rehashing old ground, and some of the best have.
To quote from:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny----
Howard P. Lovecraft. Compared to some of the tropes they've arguably spawned, certain stories of his can come across as charmingly old-fashioned and not necessarily all that horrifying to the modern reader. Or, in the case of his obvious racism, not-so-charming.
J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: This book popularized most of the cliches found in fantasy today, but modern readers may well find it unspeakably boring, purely because everything in it has since been subverted, inverted, parodied, and otherwise done to death. Aside from that though, it also has lots of Unbuilt Trope which are actually not like what non-readers think the book contains.
- He gave the first definitions of the stock races as mostly used today. Elves existed in many different forms in different mythologies, from little wingy tinkerbells to modern fantasy dwarves; now, everyone thinks "pointy ears" and intelligent beauty. Orcs were a new name, and possibly didn't exist in that form in folklore. The elf-dwarf hostilies began in Tolkien. Dwarfs as bearded miners, while that did exist before, was codified.
Michael Moorcock. A good bit of his work falls into this, especially The Elric Saga. Like The Lord of the Rings, he created or expanded upon many fantasy tropes that are commonplace now. Hell, even one of the introductions to the new paperback collections of Elric's tale states this. Also all that crazy-ass, sexually deviant, creature-of-their-time, lone wolf super spy stuff (different from the way James Bond does it, mind you)? Well, that's Jerry Cornelius, possibly Moorcock's second most famous creation.
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Moorcock - he's another that I'm fearful to reread. Elric was wonderful when I read it as a teen, but I'm not the some person now and I'd hate to be bored by his tale.
Goodgulf
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