Is ANYthing written less than 75-100 yrs ago automatically disqualified as good? I read the Potter series, and I really enjoyed it, as did my two oldests (my youngest just started them). I enjoyed the Hunger Games series. Not to be snarky, it just seems this is “one of those topics”...
It's the equivalent of the Boys' Own Paper or Youths Companion - out of school popular reading.
If we take your 75 year limit and work back, there's plenty of good stuff out there since WWII (if we use 100 years, Kipling's well within the limit, he didn't die until 1936). Faulkner, Hemingway (although I don't like him), O'Connor, Lee, Miller (Henry or Walter), Tolkien, Lewis, Orwell, Wodehouse, Sayers . . . there's plenty to choose from. I refuse to have anything to do with J.D. Salinger, who is the most overrated writer of the 20th century (my daughter adapted my dinner-table hymn of hate and got an "A" in her literature class. I think her teacher hated it too.)