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).

Best Sellers, term for books that are remarkably popular, for a brief time or over a period of many years. Seldom of great literary significance, such works are often ephemeral and dependent upon temporary tastes and interests. Nevertheless, the best‐selling book in the U.S., as in other Christian lands, has been the Bible. Publications of special sects, like the Book of Mormon and Science and Health, have also been widely circulated. Best sellers of colonial times included the New England Primer and The Day of Doom, followed later by political tracts like Common Sense, by chapbooks like Weems's life of Washington, and by almanacs. In the mid‐19th century gift books had huge sales, as did dime novels, and children's literature. Widely read poems included Hiawatha, Nothing To Wear, and Plain Language from Truthful James, and later poets with great followings included Ella Wheeler Wilcox, James Whitcomb Riley, Robert Service, and Edgar Guest. Texts that have been popular include Webster's Spelling Book and dictionary, Caleb Bingham's primers, McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, and cookbooks.

The novel has been the most popular literary genre in the U.S., and widely read works include Charlotte Temple (1794), The Spy (1821), Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), The Lamplighter (1854), St. Elmo (1867), The Gates Ajar (1868), Barriers Burned Away (1872), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Ben‐Hur (1880), Looking Backward (1888), In His Steps (1896), Hugh Wynne (1897), When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898), David Harum (1898), Richard Carvel (1899), The Call of the Wild (1903), The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903), The Clansman (1905), The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911), Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), Dere Mable! (1918), The Covered Wagon (1922), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), Anthony Adverse (1933), Gone with the Wind (1936), The Robe (1942), The Naked and the Dead (1948), From Here to Eternity (1951), The Caine Mutiny (1951), Lolita (1958), The Group (1963), and War and Remembrance (1978). The first American novel to sell over 1,000,000 copies was Uncle Tom's Cabin. In His Steps has been the most popular work with a religious theme, and Gone with the Wind has been fastest selling.

Very popular types of fiction, although not always represented by single books, are detective stories, novels of Western adventure by such authors as Harold Bell Wright, Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis L'Amour; science fiction, like that of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury; and novels by women, ranging from the moral and sentimental, like those of Kathleen Norris and Frances Parkinson Keyes, to the toughly realistic and frankly sexual, like the works of Jacqueline Susann and Erica Jong and the in‐between work of Danielle Steel. In recent years authors whose works almost consistently appear on best‐seller lists have included O'Hara and Steinbeck, and Michener, Irving Stone, Uris, Vidal, and Wouk. Popularity on first publication in hardbound editions is usually repeated in paperback reprints, but some authors, like Erskine Caldwell, find their large public only in reprints, as do works of certain desirable genres, such as the lushly romantic pseudo‐historic novels called Gothic romances. Selection by major book clubs usually assists bookstore sales and popularity of reprints. Popular plays may be considered in the category of best sellers, even if they do not always sell very well when put into print. The greatest stage successes in the U.S. have included The Drunkard, A Trip to Chinatown, The Old Homestead, Our American Cousin, Under the Gaslight, East Lynne, Rip Van Winkle, Sherlock Holmes, The Squaw Man, Lightnin', Abie's Irish Rose, The Green Pastures, Tobacco Road, Life with Father, Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, Hello, Dolly!, Pal Joey, Guys and Dolls, The Fantasticks, and A Chorus Line.

RELIGIOUS BEST-SELLERS

A Man Called Peter.

The widespread interest in religious issues was evident in popular books with religious themes in the early part of the decade of the 1950s. In 1950 the words of the late Peter Marshall, Mr. Jones Meet Your Maker, continued on the BestSeller list. In 1951 his widow, Catharine Marshall, published A Man Called Peter, a popular biography of this former chaplin of the U.S. Senate. For nearly three years the book was on the BestSeller list, and more than one million copies were sold.

Peale

Other nonfiction books with religious themes attracted large numbers of readers. In 1952 the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, continued his run of BestSellers with The Power of Positive Thinking, which sold 971,336 copies in the next three years.

Sheen

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen confirmed the popularity of his television program with a 1953 collection of his messages, Life Is Worth Living. Neither Sheen's book nor Billy Graham's collection of sermons, Peace with God, published that same year, had the lengthy life on the BestSeller list as did Peale's work.

Cardinal Spellman

In fiction Francis Cardinal Spellman published The Foundling first as a serial in Good Housekeeping magazine and then in book form. Lloyd C. Douglas's The Robe returned to the BestSeller list after the success of the film version of the novel, and his last book, The Big Fisherman, a novel about Saint Peter, continued his bestselling works.

TILLICH ON NIETZSCHE

In the following passage from The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich discusses the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his relation to Tillich's ideas about existential Christian courage:

Life has many aspects, it is ambiguous. Nietzsche has described its ambiguity most typically in the last fragment of the collection of fragments which is called the Will to Power. Courage is the power of life to affirm itself in spite of this ambiguity, while the negation of life because of its negativity is an expression of cowardice. On this basis Nietzsche develops a prophecy and philosophy of courage in opposition to the mediocrity and decadence of life in the period whose coming he saw.

Source:

Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), pp. 27-28.

Drama

In the theater the New York Drama Critics Circle chose T. S. Eliot's Cocktail Party as the best foreign play for 1950, and in 1959 Archibald Macleish's J. B., a version of the Book of Job, won the Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award for best play. Elia Kazan won the Tony for his direction of the play, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for 1958.