Religious Best-Sellers

RELIGIOUS BEST-SELLERS

Growth

As a natural consequence of increased interest in religion during the 1940s, along with growing prosperity, sales of books dealing with religious matters prospered during the decade. Religious best-sellers ranged from popular self-help books and humorous reflections on religious life to novels with religious characters or situations to studies by or about well-known religious figures.

Bible Characters

In 1940 Alan Watts published The Meaning of Happiness, which dealt not with a future reward for the good but with a present reality for those living in harmony with nature. Two best-selling novels appeared in 1942: The Robe, by Lloyd C. Douglas, and Franz Werfel's The Song of Bernadette. Also that year, the pastor for forty-four years of New York's Madison Avenue Methodist Church, Ralph W. Sockman, published The Highway of God, his Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching from the previous year at Yale University. Best-sellers for 1943 included Sholem Asch's The Apostle, a life of Paul, and On Being a Real Person, by an eloquent preacher and preeminent apologist for liberal Christianity, Harry Emerson Fosdick. That same year saw the release of David, a life of the biblical king by Duff Cooper; Col. Robert L. Scott's God Is My Co-Pilot; and Clerical Errors, the recollections of a minister named Louis Tucker.

Quakers and Mormons

Caesar and Christ by Will Durant appeared in 1944, along with Papa Was a Preacher by Alyene Porter, a humorous account by a Texas parson's daughter. That same year saw the release of Chaim Weizmann, edited by Meyer W. Weisgal, Camille M. Cianfarra's The Vatican and the War, and Heaven Below by E. H. Clayton, the story of thirty years as a missionary teacher in China. In 1945 The Friendly Persuasion by Jessamyn West featured a Quaker family in nineteenth-century Indiana, and The Human Life of Jesus by John Erskine appeared. Two additional books with religious themes were published that year: Children of the Covenant by Richard Scowcroft, the story of the Mormons; and The World, The Flesh, and Father Smith by Bruce Marshall, about a Catholic priest in a Scottish town.

Healing and Peace of Mind

In 1946 Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman's best-selling book of spiritual self-help, Peace of Mind, was published, as were Russell Janney's The Miracle of the Bells and Gladys Schmitt's David the King. The following year saw the publication of Arnold Toynbee's best-seller, An Outline to History, an updated abridgment of the first six volumes of Toynbee's A Study of History. The West would survive, he said, only if westerners turn to God. The year 1947 also saw the publication of Agnes Sligh Turnbull's The Bishop's Mantle and Pentecostal faith healer Oral Roberts's book If You Need Healing —Do These Things.

Merton and Gandhi

The year 1948 saw the release of two huge best-sellers: Lloyd C. Douglas's novel about Peter, The Big Fisherman, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton's spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Also appearing were Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew; Blanche Cannon's Nothing Ever Happens Sunday Morning, about the effects of a minister's self-righteousness; and Nehru on Gandhi, by Jawaharlal Nehru.

Banner Year

The year 1949 was the most notable year in the decade for best-sellers; no fewer than seven appeared. Peter Marshall's sermons and prayers Mr. Jones, Meet the Master was published by his wife, Catherine. It stayed on the best-seller list for almost a year. Fulton Oursler's best-known work, The Greatest Story Ever Told, was a landmark in American popular piety. Paul Blanshard criticized Roman Catholic hierarchy in American Freedom and Catholic Power. Norman Vincent Peale published A Guide to Confident Living, and Sholem Asch's Mary, the story of the mother of Jesus, appeared. Vincent J. Sheean's Lead, Kindly Light: Gandhi and the Way to Peace was released, as was Fulton J. Sheen's best-selling book on conversion, Peace of Soul. That same year Perry Miller published Jonathan Edwards, and Ann Carnahan's The Vatican appeared. Fosdick released The Man from Nazareth as His Companions Saw Him, and Sinclair Lewis published his twenty-first novel, The God-Seeker, about a Christian missionary who seeks God amid the Sioux in the mid nineteenth century.

CANVAS CATHEDRAL

On 25 September 1949 a thirty-one-year-old preacher from North Carolina, Billy Graham, began what was to be a three-week revival under a Ringling Brothers circus tent in Los Angeles. Crowds were impressive but not at capacity until press magnate William Randolph Hearst catapulted Graham into the national spotlight with a two-word memo to his associates: "Puff Graham." Now the hottest ticket in town, 350,000 came to hear him, including Gene Autry and Jane Russell. Cecil B. DeMille offered him a screen test. Three weeks stretched into eight, and the postwar revival of religion in America had found its champion.

Source:

William Martin A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story (New York: Morrow, 1991).

Source:

Donald B. Meyer, The Positive Thinkers: A Study of the Quest for Health, Wealth, and Personal Power from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965).