Bestsellers: a very short introduction by John Sutherland

Author:John Sutherland [Sutherland, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, English fiction, Literary Criticism, Literature - Classics, Criticism, European, Literary studies: fiction; novelists & prose writers, United States, Sociology, Social Science, United Kingdom; Great Britain, Reference, American, History and criticism, Sociology; Social Studies, Fiction Companions, Popular culture, USA, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, Popular literature, American fiction - History and criticism, English fiction - History and criticism, Best sellers - Great Britain - History, Popular literature - United States - History and criticism, Books & Reading, Best sellers - United States - History, Popular Culture - General, English, Popular literature - Great Britain - History and criticism, Bibliographies & Indexes, Best sellers, American fiction
ISBN: 9780199214891
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2007-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

9. To Kill a Mockingbird (1939), fi rst edition 72

of 1975–6. It scooped literary prizes, as well as the top slot in the charts. Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift also fi gured in that year’s top ten, as did Judith Rossner’s ‘feminism is more complicated than Betty Friedan would have us think’

melodrama, Looking for Mr Goodbar.

The ‘quality superseller’ was, in succeeding years, a regular feature of the popular market, with titles such as William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (#2, 1979), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfi re of the Vanities (1987), and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989). The American literary sensibility had demonstrably not been prostituted by the expanding popularity of popular fi ction, or the bestsellingness of bestsellers. The doomsayers were wrong on that score. The American bestseller

The new seriousness

As the country came to terms with its fi rst ever defeat in war – by

‘irregulars’ in black pyjamas – America’s top novel of 1977 was Leon Uris’s Trinity. The novel was also a favourite novel of IRA internees at Long Kesh: Bobby Sands, as he starved himself to death in 1981, would read the novel aloud to his fellow internees. It added considerably to their suffering, they later recorded; Jack Higgins’s ‘Dillon’ thrillers were more to their taste. Uris’s soggy saga of Irish freedom-fi ghting sold twice as many as Harold Robbins’s roman-à-clef about Jacqueline Susann, Lonely Lady. ‘Serious’ was the fl avour of the time. John Le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy reached #4 the same year, expressing as it did a growing moral exhaustion with the Cold War.

The late 1970s were good for the imported British product, particularly spy and counterspy thrillers, and 1978 saw another annus mirabilis, with Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, Ken Follett’s The Eye of the Needle, and several further Le Carré titles. Over this same period, the more robustly optimistic Frederick Forsyth was selling more strongly in the US than his native UK; 73

this line of gritty spy or special agent thriller was very much a British specialism to American taste. A novel like Day of the Jackal ‘worked’, by virtue of its seeming only too plausible, and was perhaps more appropriately ‘faction’. Robert Ludlum’s

‘paranoid thrillers’, with their wild fantasies about underground conspiracy, were, by comparison, over the top.

At the heart of the bestseller machine there had emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s a nucleus of novelists who could, for the fi rst time in American book-trade history, clear a million copies in hardback in a year, at full retail price, and then come back and do it the next year with a new title (while its predecessor went on to sell ten million in paperback). They were headed by Stephen King, who had come on the scene, inauspiciously, with Carrie in 1974. He did not stay inauspicious. King’s reliably prodigious output over the next quarter of a century would establish him as the 20th-century Edgar Allan Poe, a master of horror, and an s

unmatched money machine for whichever publisher could outbid the other for his services.

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