Types of Bestsellers

Regional Fiction

Regional stories, or tales of local color, focus on the traditional cultures of specific American regions, describing landscape and character in precise detail. Stereotypes and stock folk-tale figures often provide the inspiration for characters, and the natural environment attains a seminal role in the works as protagonists struggle to overcome adverse conditions and situations in remote natural settings.

A blend of romanticism, realism, and humor, regional tales reverberate with a nostalgia for past traditions, while exploring the tensions between rural and urban values. The dominant literary form in the late nineteenth century, regional fiction faded in popularity as a strong national identity emerged in the early twentieth century. At this point, it is rare to find a work of popular fiction in which regional setting is essential to the story.

 

Despite their immense popularity, Mark Twain's novels never appeared on bestseller lists. Enjoying higher prices and larger audiences from door-to-door sales, Twain marketed and sold his novels primarily through subscription companies, which circumvented the bookstores as agents took to the road in search of customers.

 

 

Mary Ellen Chase, a college English professor, portrayed family life on the coast of Maine and the influences of a seafaring heritage on families and characters. Mary Peters appeared on the bestseller list in 1934; a later novel, Windswept, made the list in 1941.

 

Kate Chopin's work introduces readers to a fictionalized Louisiana, in which Creoles, Acadians (Cajuns), and African Americans create a unique plantation culture. Set against this background with an exploration of sexual themes and with an adulterous heroine, The Awakening incurred moral outrage when published in 1899. By the 1960s, readers and critics recognized the novel for its complex treatment of women's experiences in the face of societal expectations.

 

 

In this reminiscence of plantation life, set in North Carolina, Charles W. Chesnutt revised romantic images of the Old South. Through the stories of the trickster Uncle Julius, the author presented popular audiences with a shrewd African-American character who could outwit his white employers.

 

Bret Harte, an innovator of Western regional fiction, set his popular tales in the mining camps and boom-towns of the Gold Rush.

 

 

Although he came out of the "Hoosier School" of regional writers, (Newton) Booth Tarkington nonetheless transcended region in this famous bestseller about growing up in a midwestern city.