This just in....
A Flesch-Kincaid analysis of Earnest Hemingway’s “The Old man And The Sea” reveals a grade-level of 4.
...Ernest Hemingway, the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose work shaped 20th-century fiction.
I think if you took Steinbeck, Twain....all of the top hundred writers...the bulk would be writing material at the fourth to sixth grade level. Simplicity is what people desire in reading material...keeping sentences short and to the point.