Have you taken English classes at a collegiate level? Not all of them, but some will cover what makes great writing great. The thing is is that what makes writing great can change.

In my experience, when someone says someone writes well, it's because they are taking as very complex idea and, using a narrative, are able to communicate that idea, on purpose, to a wide audience.

I can't use HT as a reference because I haven't read it, but I have read most of The Brothers Karamazov, and that is another example of "great" literature. In that case, while the story is quite simple ("father of three brothers is murdered, and everyone wants to know who did it" is the simplest summary I can think of) the ideas communicated in it about family, Russian society (at the time), even some ideas about what it means to be a man in a general sense (or at least not a failure of one) are all wrapped up in there. Not to mention the theological arguments Dostoyevsky talks about. That is a lot for one novel, even if it is several hundred pages. Taking all those potentially disparate philosophical arguments and combining them into one narrative is what makes the book great.

As I said though, what is considered great can change. I've also read some ancient Greek and Roman stories and they don't even have the basic idea of story structure we have today so no matter how great they were for their time, they sound awful to me. Like the Odyssey. It has some cool parts, but to me it's just a disjointed mess of all the crap that happens to this dude for no particular reason. Which probably sounded a lot better when that's how stories were written, to be more like how life happens to people. Gods apparently loved picking a punching bag back then.

Point is: what is great is also subjective, but if you want to know why we consider things great that we do, collegiate level English classes are probably your best bet, especially literature and composition ones

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