I taught at a different level, in what was only superficially the same culture.

Part of the difficulty in a discussion like this is that there were only a limited number of books I could choose from. (Mostly we did shorter works.) Most everything in introductory literature courses was prescribed, with some options of course. Later, and briefly, I could shoose what I wanted.

The most "successful" books were probably (in no particular order)

Gulliver's Travels
Macbeth
The Tempest
Catch-22
Bonfire of the Vanities
The Naked and the Dead
The Song of Roland

Heart of Darkness (prescribed for freshman lit) was beyond almost everyone. They were universally put off by the style, the pace, the ambiguity, and the question of why they should be made to read such a "racist" book.

(That was an issue that had surfaced in the media of the period, and it was almost impossible to persuade students that the book was, if anything, anti-racist. Huckleberry Finn, which I never taught, had already come under fire for the same imaginary reason.)

One poem that impressed a number of students was "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child." Once they understood it, they were appropriately staggered.

As I say, choices were limited by time, curriculum, and opportunity. There's no telling what might have been the reception of Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, King Lear, Hamlet, etc., etc.