Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (3 page)

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).

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.

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.

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 commercial
writers in history, a novelist who went on to publish dozens of number one bestsellers. How could any study of bestsellers omit Stephen King?

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:

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.

For the purposes of this book, I’ve bumped that figure up to 33 percent. One-third of the twelve novels we’ll consider were written by women.

Inevitably, any discussion of bestseller lists must take into consideration the impact of marketing and Oprah Winfrey. How valid is it to draw cultural conclusions from the bestseller list if a great many book buyers are motivated to buy a book not by the intrinsic elements in the book itself, but by slick ad campaigns or a television celebrity who caters to a unique demographic base?

Well, first, the hard reality is that clever marketing campaigns tend to work only a few times before they are copied by other marketers, thereby neutralizing the advantage. For instance, it was once rare for a writer to hit the road to promote his novel. Mark Twain is a colorful exception. With his trademark white suit and bushy mustache, his catchy nom de plume, and his stand-up comic routine, he established himself
on the rough-and-tumble lecture circuit, selling his books by hand as he moved from one small-town venue to the next. In the modern era, Jacqueline Susann is often credited with breaking new ground in book promotion. Dressed in her Pucci outfits and carrying her poodle, Josephine, under her arm, the indefatigable Ms. Susann went so far as to visit truck stops, buttering up the drivers who used to select which books to stock on the spinning racks in drugstores and groceries. Twain and Susann were pioneers of what has become commonplace with modern authors, tireless and often flamboyant self-promotion.