Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers Page 2
The paperback edition has had 135 printings, with well over 14,000,000 copies sold.
4. VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, Jacqueline Susann, 1966
Full of confidence, Anne Welles arrives in New York City just after World War II. She takes an exciting job in the entertainment business and soon has two new roommates, Neely O’Hara and Jennifer North, and a dashing suitor, Lyon Burke. But when the lives of her beautiful and talented friends begin to unravel, they take Anne Welles down with them into a tragic, drug-fueled spiral.
Number one in 1966. Approximately 30,000,000 copies sold worldwide, which puts it roughly in the same category as To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone with the Wind.
5. THE GODFATHER, Mario Puzo, 1969
After the head of the Corleone crime family, Don Vito Corleone, is shot by a rival, the empire he has devoted his life to building is in danger of dissolving, until Michael, his favorite son, a war hero and upstanding citizen, takes charge. Michael is a natural leader and quickly learns to navigate the inner workings, crude politics, and secret rituals of the Mafia, and by employing a series of swift and brutal moves, he attempts to restore power and respect to the family.
In the first two years after its publication, 1969–1970, The Godfather sold more than 1,000,000 copies in hardcover and 8,000,000 copies in paperback. By 1975, over 12,000,000 copies had sold in both hardback and softcover.
6. THE EXORCIST, William Peter Blatty, 1971
Chris MacNeil, divorced single mother and successful actress, is living in Washington, D.C., with her twelve-year-old daughter, Regan, while shooting her latest film. Regan, once a curious and happy girl, grows moody and strange. After numerous doctors and psychiatrists fail to diagnose her, Chris reaches out to a young priest, Father Karras, who realizes Regan is possessed by a demon. The battle between Karras, a religious man with shaky faith, and the devil that inhabits Regan’s body is a fierce and violent struggle that results in numerous deaths but ultimately in victory for the MacNeil family.
Four years after its publication, 11,702,097 hardback copies and 11,000,000 paperbacks had been sold.
7. JAWS, Peter Benchley, 1974
The resort town of Amity is preparing for the summer onslaught of beachgoers from the city when a young woman taking a late-night swim is killed by a shark. It is Police Chief Martin Brody’s task to decide whether to keep the beaches open for the big holiday weekend. Under pressure from town leaders, he lets them stay open, and as a result, a six-year-old local boy becomes the shark’s next victim. Driven to set things right, Brody teams up with Quint, a salty shark hunter familiar with local waters, and with Matt Hooper, an academically trained shark expert, and the three men head out to sea in Quint’s boat to capture the murderous creature.
The novel stayed on some hardbound bestseller lists for forty-four weeks, making it 1974’s longest-running fiction bestseller. More than 1,000,000 in sales in 1974.
By 1975, 9,275,000 copies of the Bantam paperback were sold.
8. THE DEAD ZONE, Stephen King, 1979
Johnny Smith is working as a high school teacher, an average guy in love with another teacher, Sarah Bracknell, when a serious head injury puts him in a coma. Years later when he wakes, Johnny discovers he has acquired the supernatural gift of foreseeing the future. He sets about finding ways to put his newfound ability to good use, solving crimes and helping individuals, until his path crosses that of Greg Stillson, a rising politician. After Johnny sees a vision of Stillson leading the nation to disaster, he decides he must do whatever is required to prevent Stillson from reaching his goal, even if it means risking his own life.
This was King’s first novel to break into the year-end top ten. His earlier hardback novels, Carrie and Salem’s Lot, had sold modestly. But when the film version of Carrie was released in 1976, King’s career moved into a higher gear. It has continued to shift ever higher with a prolific output over the last twenty years. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it was a rare year when one of King’s novels did not appear on the year-end top ten list, frequently landing at number one.
9. THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, Tom Clancy, 1984
At the height of the cold war, submarine captain Marko Ramius, who is commanding the Soviet’s newest top-secret nuclear sub, decides to defect to America. Ramius’s intentions, however, are not clear to the Americans, who enlist the aid of Jack Ryan, a naval historian and part-time CIA analyst, to help the U.S. military plan an appropriate response. When Ryan discovers that the Soviets have apparently developed a new supersilent propulsion system that could shift the military balance of power between the nations, mild-mannered Ryan is thrust into the middle of an escalating confrontation that could very well result in World War III.
The hardcover edition of this first novel sold 365,000 copies, according to a 1987 article in the Washington Post “Book World.” Five to six million copies have sold in hardback and paperback. One million copies were sold in Japan alone.
10. THE FIRM, John Grisham, 1991
Mitch McDeere, a top Harvard Law School grad, is snapped up by Bendini, Lambert & Locke, a prestigious firm in Memphis. Mitch and Abby, his bride, are thrilled by the perks: the new house, the flashy car, the big salary. But they quickly realize the firm is working on behalf of a Chicago crime family, and members of the firm are perfectly willing to commit murder to conceal this fact. After Mitch is secretly recruited by the FBI to help with its investigation of the law firm, his snooping endangers his life and the lives of others. So Mitch devises a complex and risky scheme that is meant to satisfy the FBI and free him and Abby from the sinister grip of the firm.
The Firm spent forty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Grisham’s publisher shipped over a million copies of his next novel, The Client, and two and a half million copies of the following book, The Chamber.
11. THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY,
Robert James Waller, 1992
In the mid-1960s, Robert Kincaid has been assigned by National Geographic to photograph the covered bridges of Madison County, Iowa. Shortly after arriving in Madison County, he meets Francesca Johnson, a farmer’s wife, who is home alone while her husband, Richard, and her children are away for a week’s visit to the Illinois State Fair. A brief and passionate affair between the seasoned traveler and the lonely woman ensues. After days and nights of wild romance, the pair realize they must decide their future before Richard and the children return. Both Robert and Francesca are heartsick at the prospect that they might have to part.
After selling poorly for a few months following its publication, the novel was rejuvenated when a section was published in Cosmopolitan, which attracted a large audience of female readers. Then word of mouth among independent booksellers began to spur more sales, until the book rose to become the number one bestseller in 1993, dropping to number nine the following year. Roughly 50,000,000 copies sold worldwide.
12. THE DA VINCI CODE, Dan Brown, 2003
When Jacques Saunière, head curator at the Louvre in Paris, is murdered, Robert Langdon, a highly regarded Harvard symbologist, is summoned to the scene and is immediately whisked away by Sophie Neveu, a French cop and cryptographer, who warns him that the police are trying to pin the murder on him. In trying to solve the murder of Saunière and absolve himself, Langdon embarks on a quest to expose a conspiracy that is centuries old and involves the Priory of Sion, the Holy Grail, intricate codes, and Jesus Christ.
The Da Vinci Code sold 81,000,000 copies worldwide, making it the top bestselling novel of all time.
(More detailed plot summaries of these novels can be found in the appendix.)
In choosing these twelve, I first consulted Alice Payne Hackett, the leading authority on which books sold the most throughout the twentieth century. Hers is the book I bumped into in the library stacks three decades ago that set me on this course to begin with. Although her 80 Years of Best Sellers is a bit dry, it is indispensable for anyone interested in popular fiction. With the zeal of an IRS auditor, Ms. Hackett
spent years analyzing sales figures compiled by her employer Publishers Weekly, a magazine geared for industry insiders, and put together a master list of the most commercially successful novels of previous decades.
While Ms. Hackett’s work is the gold standard for book sales info, her commentary on popular novels is largely a recitation of publishing factoids, interspersed with a few dreary plot summaries. A far more lively account of bestsellers is Michael Korda’s excellent survey Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900–1999. Mr. Korda relied on lists from The Bookman, a periodical that first began to publish a monthly bestseller list in 1895. The modern lists Korda used appeared in Publishers Weekly. (The New York Times didn’t begin to print its own list until 1942.)
Most of the pages of Mr. Korda’s slender volume are taken up by the fiction and nonfiction lists themselves, but what text exists is richly spiced with tidbits. Did you know, for instance, that Mark Twain never made the bestseller list in part because he found it more profitable to sell his books himself through the earliest form of book clubs, as well as through house-to-house sales? Knock, knock. Who’s there? Mark Twain with your new copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Although Mr. Korda doesn’t try to determine what constants bestsellers might possess, he does a solid job of sketching out the general contours of bestseller land. He’s particularly good at presenting the history of publishing trends and demonstrating the book business’s symbiotic connection with major world events, such as war, the Depression, and the flower power era of the 1960s. Though the connection between book sales and popular fashion is a slippery subject, Mr. Korda is masterful at making the case that a novel’s success is often influenced by larger cultural forces in vogue at any given moment.
When it came time for me to formulate the basic structure of the reading list for this book, Ms. Hackett’s “combined list” (which adds together paperback and hardback sales figures) was the obvious starting place.
Here are Hackett’s bestselling novels between 1895 and 1975 (with the novels I’ve selected in bold).
1. The Godfather, 1969, Mario Puzo, 12,140,000 sold.
2. The Exorcist, 1971, William Peter Blatty, 11,700,000 sold.
3. To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960, Harper Lee, 11,120,000 sold.
4. Peyton Place, 1956, Grace Metalious, 10,670,000 sold.
5. Love Story, 1970, Erich Segal, 9,905,000 sold.
6. Valley of the Dolls, 1966, Jacqueline Susann, 9,500,000 sold.
7. Jaws, 1974, Peter Benchley, 9,475,000 sold.
8. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, 1970, Richard Bach, 9,055,000 sold.
9. Gone with the Wind, 1936, Margaret Mitchell, 8,630,000 sold.
10. God’s Little Acre, 1933, Erskine Caldwell, 8,260,000 sold.
It’s interesting to note that the decades of the 1960s and 1970s contain more than their share of the largest bestsellers of all times, while the 1940s is missing in action, as are the first two decades of the century. For those readers interested in such matters, Korda’s Making the List sketches out some of the historical, economic, and cultural factors that shaped these decade-by-decade differences in sales figures, but such considerations are not my focus here.
For the purposes of this book, I made some nips and tucks to Hackett’s master list. I’ve jettisoned two mushy books, Love Story and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, replacing them with the more recent (though, let’s admit it, equally mushy) The Bridges of Madison County. I’ve also dropped that ode to incest and small-town squalor God’s Little Acre, because those same subjects are already well represented by Peyton Place and To Kill a Mockingbird.
To flesh out the total to an even dozen, I included four more novels. I’m confident the authors I’ve added would be on any modern reader’s top ten list: John Grisham, Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Tom Clancy.
OUT OF PRINT
All the books on our reading list are still in print, but the same cannot be said for the great majority of bestsellers from the past century. Most of the smash hits of yesteryear can no longer be unearthed except by shopping at rare-book dealers. Such novelists as Warwick Deeping, Russell Janney, Ethel Vance, May Sinclair, and Harry Bellamann (whose Kings Row was made into a film starring Ronald Reagan) all had their fifteen minutes of literary fame, riding atop the bestseller lists of previous decades, but all are virtually unknown today. Which makes you wonder which of the huge bestsellers of our current age will still be around fifty years from now and beyond, and how and why one lives on and another doesn’t.
For instance, how about Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller? Still in print, though no longer widely read, Ms. Miller’s 1934 novel, which is set in pre–Civil War Georgia and won the Pulitzer Prize, will always be a quirky footnote in American bestseller history. After witnessing the great commercial success of Caroline Miller’s novel, Macmillan editor Harold S. Latham went shopping for other books with similar southern settings and in the process discovered Margaret Mitchell. Would Gone with the Wind have been published and heavily promoted without Lamb in His Bosom nudging open the door? It’s one of those intriguing and unanswerable questions. But it’s entirely possible that Caroline Miller is as responsible for our knowing and loving Rhett and Scarlett and Ashley Wilkes as Margaret Mitchell was.
FIRST NOVELS AND BREAKOUT BOOKS
Successful first novels are more likely to reveal popular tastes than bestsellers written by an established author. Because of the brand-name effect, a tenth or twentieth novel by Danielle Steel or John Grisham or Stephen King is virtually guaranteed a spot on the bestseller list and as such is less an indicator of public tastes than an indicator of public habits—and therefore is not particularly useful in demonstrating the recurring features that helped make it popular.
When an author’s first novel does manage to overcome the incredible odds against it and turns into a commercial success, the student of popular culture needs to pay special attention. In such a case, readers and publishers had little reason to come to it beyond the appeal of the story itself. The combination of factors that sets apart that bestselling first novel from the hundreds of other first novels that remain in obscurity is exactly what my research was attempting to uncover.
After first novels, the next most instructive books are those that used to be known as a “breakout” novels—that is, the first book of an established author that cracks the bestseller list.
Back when publishers had the patience and the financial wherewithal to nurture a writer through the early, unprofitable stages of his or her career, it was not uncommon for a novelist to publish half a dozen books or more that didn’t make a profit without being abandoned by the editor or publisher, usually because the editor was convinced the writer’s work was solid and worthy and would one day find a larger audience. As a more tightfisted corporate model gradually replaced this charitable system, and publishers were buffeted by a succession of economic and industry upheavals, the patience required to wait for a “breakout book” all but disappeared. These days, if a writer does not succeed on the first or second try, his or her career is likely to flatline.
Of the twelve books on the list we’ll be examining, a surprising seven were first novels: To Kill a Mockingbird, Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls, Gone with the Wind, Jaws, The Bridges of Madison County, and The Hunt for Red October. The rest appeared early enough in the writers’ careers to qualify as “breakout” novels. Grisham’s The Firm was his second attempt, while The Godfather was Puzo’s third book. William Peter Blatty wrote four comic novels before he circled in on The Exorcist. The Da Vinci Code was Dan Brown’s third try. Stephen King had already cranked out eight books before The Dead Zone finished as the year-end number six bestseller.
The Dead Zone is unique among the others on my list. At roughly 175,000 hardbacks sold, its numbers fall far short of The Godfather or Gone with the Wind or the others we’re considering. I included The Dead Zone because it was the first year-end bestselling hardback from one of the top com
mercial writers in history, a novelist who went on to publish dozens of number one bestsellers. How could any study of bestsellers omit Stephen King?
FEMALE SCRIBBLERS
Another factor I considered in fine-tuning my reading list was gender. Diversity is a tricky matter. As Leslie Fiedler wrote in “Literature and Lucre,” “The struggle of High Art and low has, moreover, been perceived as a battle of the sexes. Referring to the writers who had preempted the paying audience before he ever entered the scene, Nathaniel Hawthorne called them a ‘horde of female scribblers.’ ”
When more than three-quarters of the book-buying public are women, one would assume that female authors would populate the bestseller lists in greater proportion than men. But that’s not the case. Based on a quick and totally unscientific sampling, using the results for the year-end bestselling totals for the opening year of each decade, I found quite the opposite to be true:
In 1900 two of ten were women.
In 1910 five of ten were women.
In 1920 three of ten were women.
In 1930 four of ten were women.
In 1940 one of ten were women.
In 1950 three of ten were women.
In 1960 two of ten were women.
In 1970 two of ten were women.
In 1980 two of ten were women.
In 1990 five of ten were women.
So in the twentieth century, the average is somewhere around two or three women on the year-end list. Far less than half and not at all what Nathaniel Hawthorne so chauvinistically imagined. John Bear, in his collection of intriguing facts about bestsellers (The #1 New York Times Best Seller), graphs the gradual increase in female authors who have achieved the number one slot on the Times list. From the forties through the eighties, the percentage of women reaching the pinnacle of the bestseller list hovered around 20 percent, while in the nineties the percentage climbed to 27.9 percent.