What's Everyone Reading? Popular Fiction and Nonfiction

WHAT'S EVERYONE READING? POPULAR FICTION AND NONFICTION

Unusual Best-Sellers

Histories of twelve hundred pages generally do not sell well, but William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), about Nazi Germany, proved an exception by selling more than half a million copies and remaining on the best-seller list through 1961. It was a good decade for nonfiction in general, though best-seller-list definitions of what constituted nonfiction in some cases seemed arbitrary, including Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" collections and Rod McKuen's books of poems, for example. Readers are always interested in sex, and Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (1962) found a voracious readership.

Best-Selling Literature

Despite the concerns of critics, professors, and others that quality fiction was being smothered by a mass of popular fiction, it was also a good decade for literature: J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey (1961), Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools (1962), William Faulkner's The Reivers (1962), Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963), Saul Bellow's Herzog (1964), Bernard Malamud's The Fixer (1966), Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966), Philip Roth's controversial Portnoy's Complaint (1969), and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) all reached the best-seller lists.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

In July 1960 a previously unknown southern writer named Harper Lee (1926-) published a first novel that briefly made her a household name. To Kill a Mockingbird was an instant success, selling half a million copies in one year and winning the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The response was understandable, since Lee had a terrific story and told it well. Set in a rural Alabama town in the 1930s, To Kill a Mockingbird is the story of six-year-old Jean Louise ("Scout") as she experiences two sets of events: her widowed father's defense of a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and her realization that the reclusive "Boo" Radley is neither strange nor evil, as the townspeople think. In both cases Lee demonstrates the follies of prejudice. Such a theme was particularly relevant in the early 1960s, when Americans were still adjusting to desegregation and when the civil rights movement was beginning to grow in strength. Without seeming to preach to her readers, Lee made a strong case for tolerance and understanding.

A successful film of To Kill a Mockingbird was re-leased in 1962, with a screenplay by Horton Foote and starring Gregory Peck as attorney Atticus Finch, Scout's father. Each received an Academy Award for his work. The popularity of the book and the movie led to great expectations for Lee's next novel, which she was said to have begun in 1961, but she has not published anything since To Kill a Mockingbird.

Beach Reading

In 1960 President John F. Kennedy mentioned that British author Ian Fleming's From Russia, with Love (1957) was one of his ten favorite novels. Soon Fleming's thrillers featuring secret agent James Bond were wildly successful, from bookstores to the big screen. Fleming's books had plenty of company on popular-fiction bookshelves. One of the most popular (though not critically acclaimed) novelists of the decade was Harold Robbins, and books such as Morris West's The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), about the election of a new pope; Irving Wallace's The Man (1964), about a black vice-president who becomes the first black president; Arthur Hailey's Hotel (1965) and Airport (1968); Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966); James Clavell's Tai-Pan (1966); and Gore Vidal's racy Myra Breckinridge (1968) all sold well.

Genre Fiction

In fiction categorized by traditionally popular subjects, romance novels and science fiction and fantasy were in, while the realms of detective novels and Westerns, losing major talents, sought to rediscover their purpose and audience. Certain science-fiction and fantasy writers, such as Robert A. Heinlein with his novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and British author J. R. R. Tolkien with his Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955), became cult favorites on college campuses. So did many of the writers of science fiction's New Wave, including Harlan Ellison, who edited the much-discussed New Wave anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). In addition, horror fiction had its first best-selling novel with Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967), which prefigured the horror-fiction boom of the 1970s.