Bestsellers List Revisited: 1974 (Fiction) -- An Interview with Jay Parini About "Burr" by Gore Vidal

"In a novel like Burr I’m not composing a polemic about the founding fathers. Rather, I am describing the way men who want power respond to one another, to themselves," Gore Vidal told The Paris Review.

In the spring of 1974, as the Watergate scandal that would bring down the presidency of Richard Nixon was playing out in the halls of Congress and across the news media, Vidal's Burr, a look at the American Revolution and Early Republic through the eyes of its darkest figure, Aaron Burr, was at the top of the New York Times fiction bestsellers list.

"How diabolically well-timed is the appearance of Gore Vidal's latest novel, Burr; just at this most disillusioning moment in American history when all the old verities are beginning to seem hollow, Mr. Vidal gives us an interpretation of our early history that says in effect that all the old verities were never much to begin with. And what a tour de force is the result!...What an employment for the usable past! What hagiography for the Nixon era!" wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times.

Bestsellers List Revisited -- 1974: Harry S. Truman Resurgent with "Plain Speaking" by Merle Miller

The Committee Room looks back forty years to the spring of 1974 when Plain Speaking: an Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman by Merle Miller topped the New York Times Non-Fiction bestseller list. Miller's book presents Truman as a straight talking, salty-tongued Midwestern sage. This was a fresh take on a former president who up to this time had been generally dismissed by scholars and the public as a hack politician out of his depth as leader of the free world.

The success of Plain Speaking led to a major reevaluation of Truman and his presidency.

Miller's "oral biography," published by the Berkley Publishing Corporation, is based on lengthy taped interviews that Miller conducted with Truman in 1961 and 1962, a dozen years before the book's release. At the time of the interviews, Truman was in his late seventies, living in retirement in his hometown of Independence, Missouri, and mostly ignored by the political establishment. Miller, a jack-of-all-trades Manhattan-based writer whose work included screenplays, television scripts, novels, and journalism, was hired to interview Truman for a proposed series of television programs on the former president and his administration. The proposed series was never made due to a lack of interest from television networks and Miller simply held on to the tapes.

Best Sellers of the Past: What's Still Worth Reading?

The Sea-Hawk by Rafael Sabatini.
A bestseller in 1923.

Who were the towering figures of twentieth century American literature? Well, that depends. If number of copies sold is the measurement then Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner should step aside. Welcome in Gene Stratton Porter, Harold Bell Wright, Lloyd C. Douglas, and a host of other novelists whose names are only vaguely familiar nowadays if recognized at all.

Does anyone read the work of these authors today? Linda Aragoni does. Since 2007, Aragoni has been reviewing long ago bestsellers for her blog Great Penformances. Aragoni addresses only books written after 1900 but none less than fifty years old. She crafts her pithy reviews in terms of how the story would appeal to today's readers.

"In some ways, reading older fiction is like reading history only it's history on the personal level," Aragoni explained to The Committee Room. "Vintage fiction takes us back to another time, gives us not only facts about what happened and how people lived, but what mattered to them and why it mattered."

An editor, writer, and writing instructor based in Upstate New York, Aragoni reviewed older novels for a local weekly newspaper. "I just picked up whatever was handy at the library and that was the book I reviewed," Aragoni told TCR. After starting Great Penformances she began to read more systematically.

Bestsellers List Revisited: Holiday Season 1952-53 (part 2): Tallulah Tells Her Story

First edition, 1952

The Committee Room continues its look back at the holiday season bestsellers of sixty years ago. TCR's last posting discussed East of Eden by John Steinbeck which was number one on the New York Times bestselling fiction list. We turn now to non-fiction. At the top of the Times list was My Autobiography by the legendary actress Tallulah Bankhead.

Published by Harper and Brothers, Bankhead's My Autobiography settled into the number one spot in October 1952 and stayed there through the Christmas and New Year's 1953 season. Other titles in the non-fiction top ten at this time were The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson, which had been on the list for over a year, and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.

At the time of My Autobiography's release, Bankhead was fifty years old and experiencing a career boost as one of the hosts of The All Star Revue, a highly touted television variety show, on NBC. She had moved to television after two years of hosting The Big Show, a prestigious NBC radio variety program. Bankhead's gift for witty repartee was used to good advantage in variety show introductions though guests on the programs often approached her with trepidation, knowing her unpredictability.

Paperback, 1953

According to biographer Denis Brian, Bankhead began tape recording her life story in the summer of 1951 at her Bedford Village, New York home. The transcribed tapes of Bankhead's anecdotal, name-dropping (often of personalities now forgotten) and selectively revealing reminiscences were organized and edited by leading show business press agent Richard Maney. At the opening of My Autobiography Bankhead offers a "Citation to Richard Maney for Conduct Above and Beyond the Call of Duty" but doesn't specify what he did.

Born in Alabama in 1902, Bankhead won a beauty contest as a teenager which led to an acting career. In the early 1920s, after a few small roles in the New York theater, she got a part in a British stage production. In London she quickly gained notoriety for her flamboyant, eager to shock behavior off-stage as much as for her acting in plays such as Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted.

Bestsellers List Revisited -- Holiday Season 1952 (part 1) Steinbeck the Postmodernist

First edition, 1952

The Committee Room looks back sixty holiday seasons to Christmas 1952/New Year's 1953 when John Steinbeck's East of Eden headed the New York Times list of bestselling fiction.

Other titles in the fiction top ten were The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize winning Navy court martial story which by this point had been in the top ten for nearly two years; Giant, a tale of Texas cattle and oil fortunes, by Edna Ferber; The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain, an updating of the Holy Grail legend; and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.  

Steinbeck considered East of Eden his most ambitious and important novel. In November 1951, after completing a full year of arduous work on East of Eden Steinbeck wrote to a friend -- "In my book just finished I have put all the things I have wanted to write all my life. This is 'the book.'  If it is not good I have fooled myself all the the time...Having done this I can do anything I want. Always I had this book waiting to be written."

First paperback edition, 1954

Dedicated by Steinbeck to his two young sons, Thomas and John IV, East of Eden is a sprawling saga of two California families -- the Hamiltons, closely based on Steinbeck's mother's family, and the fictional Trasks -- that spans the decades from the Civil War through World War I. Published by Viking in September 1952, East of Eden received mixed reviews. Few critics considered it superior to Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the 1939 bestseller about Oklahoma migrants to California which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

In December 1952, Steinbeck wrote -- "I guess I just don't bring out the best in critics. Maybe I've been around too long. The tradition is that writers of English die young. Maybe that outrages them. The pleasant thing is that people go right on reading the books."

Bestsellers List Revisited -- 1962: Katherine Anne Porter Knocks Out J.D. Salinger

First U.S. edition

Fifty years ago, in 1962, Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools spent six months at the top of the New York Times bestsellers list and went on the become the bestselling novel of  the year.  

Released on April Fool's Day, Ship of Fools received mostly positive, sometimes glowing reviews. It quickly moved to the top of the Times list, knocking J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey from the top position. Other books on the Times list that spring were The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone's fictionalized life of Michelanglo, and Harper Lee's now classic To Kill a Mockingbird, which had been on the list for nearly two years.

30 Years Ago: Fonda, Ludlum, and Jakes

Thirty years ago -- May 1982 -- these books topped the New York Times Bestseller Lists --

Non-Fiction: Jane Fonda's Workout Book by Jane Fonda (Simon & Shuster, $17.95)

Fiction: The Parsifal Mosaic by Robert Ludlum (Random House, $15.95)

By year's end Ludlum's Parsifal had edged out Fonda's Workout, the non-fiction champ, as the biggest selling book of 1982.


The Parsifal Mosaic was so popular it sold almost twice as many copies as the second bestselling fiction title, North and South by John Jakes.

Robert Ludlum died in 2001 at age 73. Before his death, he arranged for his authorial brand to continue after he was gone. The Sigma Protocol (2001) was the last book written entirely by Ludlum. Since then many authors have contributed to "Robert Ludlum" novels. Ludlum's friend, noted fantasy and thriller author Eric Van Lustbader, has continued the popular Jason Bourne series.

Jane Fonda, now 74, came out with a self-help book Prime Time: Love, Health, Sex, Fitness, Friendship, Spirit -- Making the Most of All of Your Life in 2011 and her autobiography My Life So Far in 2005.  She blogs regularly on her website Janefonda.com.

John Jakes, now 80, has published popular historical novels since the mid-1970s when the first installments of his Kent Family Chronicles (The Bastard, The Rebels, and The Seekers) were bestsellers.  His most recent works include The Gods of Newport (2006), about the Rhode Island resort in the 1890s, and Savannah or a Gift for Mrs. Lincoln (2004), a Civil War Christmas story set during Sherman's march to the sea.

Bestseller List Revisited -- 1972: The Friends of Eddie Coyle

2010 edition

The Committee Room looks back forty years to the spring of 1972 when The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a slim novel by young Boston lawyer George V. Higgins, found its way onto the New York Times Bestseller List.  Topping the list that spring were The Winds of War by Herman Wouk and Wheels by Arthur Hailey, both mammoth tomes written by aging titans.

George V. Higgins, a Boston College and Stanford University educated writer turned lawyer turned back to writer, wrote several unpublished novels before getting The Friends of Eddie Coyle accepted at Alfred A. Knopf. Part of the novel's sixth chapter had appeared in a different form under the title "Dillon Explained That He Was Frightened" in the North American Review (Fall 1970).

In his introduction to its 2010 Picador edition, Boston novelist Dennis Lehane calls Eddie Coyle "the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years.  It is also quite possibly one of the four or five best crime novels ever written.  It casts such a long shadow that all of us who toil in the genre known as American noir do so in its shade."

Elmore Leonard goes even further. In his introduction to Eddie Coyle's 2000 edition, he declares it "the best crime novel ever written – makes The Maltese Falcon read like Nancy Drew."