Types of Bestsellers

Bestsellers and American Mores

In 1662, Reverend Michael Wigglesworth set out to warn Puritans of the consequences of their relapse into sin and immorality in his work Day of Doom. Arguably the first American bestseller, it numbered 1,800 copies and represents an early example of popular literature that condemns and seeks to reform the morals of readers-or, at least, the morals of an authors contemporary readers. Albeit not as positive as the self-help book, a staple of the American non-fiction market from its earliest days, instructive fiction also aims at personal improvement.

Through the nineteenth century, most novels preoccupied with morality embraced a Christian prescription for individual well-being, success, and salvation. Consider, for example, the highly suggestive title of Charles Sheldon's novel In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1897). Likewise, for children, Sunday school books provided moral instruction and examples of piety in simplified narratives. These trends continued into the twentieth century, with novels like Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna (1913) and Bruce Barton's non-fiction bestseller The Man Nobody Knows (1925), which argued that businessmen could learn from the life of Jesus. After World War I, it became more common for popular fiction to be critical of American life on secular grounds, as most of the novels in this case show. Spiritualism, nonetheless, resurfaces in Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Celestine Prophecy, although not in any form that Rev. Wigglesworth would have recognized.

"Since the publication of Babbitt, everyone has learned that conformity is the great price that our predominantly commercial culture exacts of American life. But when Babbitt was published, this was its revelation to Americans, and this was likewise how the novel differed from all novels about business that had been published before it." Mark Schorer, Landmarks of American Writing.

Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.

From the Taylor Collection of American Bestsellers.
Gift of Mrs. R. C. Taylor.

Richard Wright's most famous novel was completed on a Guggenheim fellowship, became a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, and sold a quarter of a million copies in its first month of publication. The critic Irving Howe said of it, The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of old lies.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940.

From the Taylor Collection of American Bestsellers.
Gift of Mrs. R. C. Taylor.

The title of Sloan Wilson's first and most successful novel came to stand for the 1950s corporate man, struggling with internal and external pressures to conform. The hero's uneasy recollection of his own wartime transgressions suggests the discontinuity between the battlefields of World War II and the suburbs of the 1950s.

Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955.

From the Taylor Collection of American Bestsellers.
Gift of Mrs. R. C. Taylor.

About this novel, Leslie Fiedler wrote: Wouk [suggests] . . . that the Jew was never (or is, at least, no longer) the rootless dissenter, the stranger which legend has made him, but rather the very paragon of the happy citizen at home, loyal, chaste, thrifty, pious, and moderately successful-in short, Marjorie Morningstar.

Gene Kelly and Natalie Wood starred in the 1958 movie version of Herman Wouks novel of assimilation.

Wouk, Herman. Marjorie Morningstar. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955.

From the Taylor Collection of American Bestsellers. Gift of Mrs. R. C. Taylor.

Richard Bach found the inspiration for Jonathan Livingston Seagull in two periods of cinematic visions, which came eight years apart. When finally published after having been refused by 20 publishers (a possible first), the novel broke all publishing records since Gone with the Wind. With almost no advertising, the book sold a million copies in 1972 alone.

Bach, Richard. Jonathan Livingston Seagull. New York: Macmillan, 1970.

From the Taylor Collection of American Bestsellers. Gift of Mrs. R. C. Taylor.

The Richmond-born Tom Wolfe had been associated with the development of New Journalism, which incorporated fictional elements into news reporting, before branching into fiction with his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. Jonathan Yardley called it "a superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right." Interestingly, in 1989, Wolfe predicted a spiritual awakening in America in the 1990s

Wolfe, Tom. The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987.

From the Taylor Collection of American Bestsellers. Gift of Mrs. R. C. Taylor.

James Redfield printed and distributed this spiritual self-help novel out of his home. He claims to have sold 100,000 copies by mail, before selling The Celestine Prophecy to Warner Books in 1993. The book arrived at number three on the annual bestseller list in 1994, number six in 1995, and number fifteen in 1996, making it one of a limited group of titles to have reached the annual lists three years in a row.

Redfield, James. The Celestine Prophecy.

New York: Warner, 1993.
Gift of Lynda Fuller Clendenning.