Korda 1955

Hi everyone,

Here's a too-long analysis of the Bestseller list for 1955, followed by a question

As Americans were coming up on their tenth year of perpetuating an image of postwar normalcy, argues Michael Korda, “the dam broke” (Making the List 102). According to Korda, 1955 was the year in which the New York Times Best Seller list first demonstrated that this version of the

American Way

of Life was problematic. In his estimation, this list demonstrates how Americans, while striving for quiet after the War and for prosperity after the Depression, had ignored what blind faith in capitalism and in God could do to their nation.

The list itself indeed contains evidence of the cultural desires both to cling to piety and to reform the problems that this overt morality had created. Evidence of the former desire lives on the nonfiction list, which contains two titles written by evangelical preachers (Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and Billy Graham’s The Secret of Happiness), a biography of a chaplain (A Man Called Peter), and three volumes that champion an emotional, physical, and (implicitly) spiritual health (Gifts from the Sea, Better Homes and Gardens Diet Book, How to Live 365 Days a Year). Two other nonfiction books somberly remind readers of the Depression and the War (The Family of Man and Harry Truman’s Year of Decisions, respectively), while another tacitly affirms the type of world-wide policing that the U.S. practiced in Europe and in the Pacific (Inside Africa).

It is mostly the fiction side of the 1955 Best Seller list that suggests Americans’ growing unrest with this Christian-capitalist model. Though Why Johnny Can’t Read, which exposes illiteracy in the supposedly utopian suburbs, is a nonfiction, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Not As a Stranger, and Ten North Frederick point out the flaws of this model through the novel form. The presence of Bonjour Tristesse and Auntie Mame on the list illustrates a growing desire to escape this restrictive model, just as Marjorie Morningstar’s place at the top of the fiction list demonstrates how ready this society was to have its religious diversity reflected through a Jewish female protagonist.

A review of the October 30^th, 2011 New York Times Best Seller list helps to put the 1955 list and its titles in context. As Korda suggests (212-213), the 1955 list would have included all of the editions that the 2011 list breaks apart: hardcover, trade paperback, and mass-market (or “pulp”). Given the rising mass-market and declining hardcover sales that Korda notes of 1958, it is likely that the 1955 list was dominated by mass-market titles. Moreover, at least half of the 1955 nonfiction list (Gifts from the Sea, The Power of Positive Thinking, How to Live 365 Days a Year, Better Homes and Gardens Diet Book, The Secret of Happiness) would be classified “Advice & Miscellaneous,” rather than “Nonfiction,” on the 2011 list.

As I reread what I've written here and reconsider Korda's work, I wonder about the dangers of reading too deeply into a bestseller list. Do others feel that they would have read their list differently, had Korda's narrative of the year not been on their minds?

-Erin