Korda, 1937

1930-1939

In the introductory material on the years 1930-1939, Korda notes several changes in publishing that shaped the way that the industry works today. The first change, wrought by the Great Depression, was the initiation of the policy of returning unsuccessful books to the bookseller. This back-up plan allowed booksellers the ability to buy large quantities of books to sell, on the condition that if they could not move the books, the booksellers would be able to return the books to the publisher. What began as an emergency solution for a failing industry has now become a stable of the publishing and book-selling world.

A second change that the thirties saw was the segmentation of editorial positions within individual publishing companies. Before 1930, most editors worked with all genres and in all fields. But, during these years, publishing companies began to hire editors for particular kinds of books. Korda notes that publishing companies were especially (and unsurprisingly) hiring editors who specialized in politics at this time.

In spite of these changes, Korda maintains that the book industry in the 1930’s very much resembles the book industry today: “Americans still want to be amused, entertained, and improved.”

1937

Korda calls 1937 a “vintage year in fiction,” and not without cause. First on the fiction list is Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, a best seller for the second year running. The fiction list also includes Robert’s Northwest Passage (#2), Woolf’s The Years (#6), and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (#8). The non-fiction list begins with Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, a best-seller that has influenced many works since, from self-help pamphlets to pick-up artist manuals. The non-fiction list also includes The Return to Religion, by Henry C. Link, Orchids on your Budget, by Marjorie Hillis, and Noel Coward's book of memoirs, Present Indicative.

I believe that Korba is mostly right when he says that the books that sell best today function in the same way that they did in the 1930’s; they amuse, entertain and improve. But, the books that become the most popular often do so for specific reasons relating to their particular time of publication. Korba terms Gone with the Wind “a phenomenon,” and seems bothered that it topped Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza in 1936, or Steinbeck in 1937. In fact, Korba comes close to terming the novel "trash"; the implication is that Gone with the Wind amuses and entertains, but does not benefit or instruct the reader in the way that more sophisticated works lower down on the list did. On the contrary, I believe that Gone with the Wind became so wildly popular (and was made into a wildly popular film only two years later) because it articulated many of the doubts and difficulties plaguing a Depression era country troubled by an unsettled Europe, while cloaking these truths in the guise of a history passed just long enough ago. As Korba points out when discussing the rise of political biography, the last of the Civil War soldiers were dying in the 1930's, making the war officially and safely historic. In Gone with the Wind, the Civil War conjures up romantic images of America rather than the harsh and alienating memories of conflict. This must have been comforting for Americans worried about the state of affairs in Europe in the late 1930's; though devastating, the Civil War was a wholly American war.

Scarlett O’Hara had to deal with a ravaged homeland in ways that would have seemed familiar to Depression era men and women; after a childhood of relative luxury, she began having to work hard to take care of herself and to put food on the table for her friends and family. The moment when Scarlett makes herself a new dress out of her old velvet curtains might have seemed familiar to the women who dyed their legs with tea when they could not afford stockings, the same women who might have purchased Orchids on your Budget. What might have been seen as humiliating manifestations of poverty were recast as ways a heroine can show her pluck. Reading Gone with the Wind would indeed have been an escapist pleasure, but it did not allow for a complete escape. In this way, it let readers metabolize the hardships they were dealing with in a removed setting. Gone with the Wind is also a problematic text in many ways, not least because of its treatment of race relations and slavery, but its problems as well as its assets deserve cultural consideration. I don’t think that a best-seller of this magnitude deserves to be written off as simply an anomaly; Gone with the Wind both reflected and provided release from the day-to-day troubles of 1937.