Peter Conn opens the course by telling how much he enjoyed preparing this series of lectures. To begin with, he's had a personal interest in the subject for quite some time. One of his books, a biography of the popular novelist and activist Pearl Buck, he had the chance to think about the phenomenon of the bestseller. Buck's novels have sold literally millions of copies, both in English and translation, totaling more than 70 languages. He found himself asking why she earned such conspicuous commercial success over several decades? He developed a few tentative answers, which will be reported when we actually discuss Buck's most famous novel, The Good Earth.

This course has given Peter the opportunity to research the subject from all sorts of additional angles, using a wide variety of fictional and nonfictional examples. He's had the chance to reread, or as he confesses in some cases, to read for the first time, a list of novels and non-fiction texts that have provided enjoyment for decades, in some cases even generations, of American readers.

Beyond that, the questions that bestselling books raise, are interesting and important. By looking carefully at these texts, many of them still popular, we can gain valuable insights into our national history and culture. We will also have occasion to speculate on American values and the changing nature of American society. A good place to start, is probably with a definition. What is a bestseller? The phrase may seem self-evident, but in fact it contains more than a little room for debate. To begin with, as applied to books, the term bestseller dates back only to the 1890s. By 1895, a magazine called The Bookman published a list of books, in what it called the order of demand. The top selling novel on that first list, by the way, was a Scottish romance by Ian Maclaren with the wonderful title of Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush.

For every novel or work of non-fiction published earlier than the 1890s, we have to rely on reconstructed lists based on records that are usually incomplete. Indeed, through most of the 20th century, the sales figures on which newspapers relied for their bestseller lists remained sketchy and frequently erroneous. Counting is more reliable today, yet that is a fairly recent development. Historically the measurement of book sale transactions was primitive, subject to all sorts of human error. Furthermore, publishers realized early in the 20th century that success breeds success, that many people will often buy a book if many others have done so, so that it was commercially smart to have a bestseller.

In response, Peter hopes he does not shock us with the news that publishers sometimes manipulated books sales to promote more sales. Among other tricks, they would send hired help to visit book stores and buy up every copy of the target title. If the scheme worked, the manufactured interest would promote new orders, which would document a non-existent demand that might in turn become real. Today, to avoid such self promotion, the algorithm by which the New York Times establishes its accounts is frequently adjusted and is treated as a state secret.

Blocked in one direction, publishers will try to beat the system in others. A friend of Peter's, a book review editor of a major newspaper, became interested in the man paperback reprints that were festooned with the phrase National Bestseller, always in large type. He started checking the original cover sales figures for some of these books, and discovered that almost none of them had ever actually appeared in any bestseller list. His conclusion was that publishers simply make it up.

Now anyone who misused the name of the New York Times or Publishers Weekly in such fraudulent claims, would probably face a lawsuit. Yet there is no law in simply asserting, regardless of the facts, that some book or other, one in fact that no one has ever heard of, is a bestseller. The same opportunistic logic applies in that is a book is advertised as already popular, even if it isn't ans wasn't, it's more likely to attract even more readers. So beware.

You should also be suspicious of the phrase 300,000 or more copies in print. Who vouches for the numbers of copies in print? How many copies that were actually sold? How many were returned to the publisher? How many wound up on that dollar book table on the sidewalk outside the bookstore?

Whatever the method we use to identify bestsellers, the distinction must be made, as several scholars of popular literature have pointed out, the term bestseller is misleading. It's really a comparative phrase, masquerading as a superlative. We mean that for any given period of time, weeks or years are the most familiar units, there is surely only one book that has actually sold more copies than any other, even if until recently we couldn't be absolutely sure which one it was.

However, from that first reference in 1895 to the present, bestsellers have always appeared as lists, rather than as single titles. When we say that a book is a bestseller, we invariably mean that it appeared somewhere in a tabulation of 10, 15, or even more books.

It's true that advertising copy will trumpet the phrase "number one bestseller" whenever possible, yet the more general significance of this coveted label is quite frankly something like "a book that has sold a lot of copies, along with a lot of other books that have also sold a lot of copies."

To add to the confusion, recent lists have proliferated in increasingly specialized categories. The New York Times book review, the most frequently cited authority, may include as many as a dozen lists of bestsellers. In addition to tabulations of fiction and non-fiction, each with 15 titles, readers can browse separate lists of paperback bestsellers in fiction, further subdivided into trade fiction and mass market fiction, and paperback non-fiction. Other groups called labels of advise, how-to, and miscellaneous. Mysteries often get their own lists, as do children's books, science fiction, cookbooks. The paper's business section adds two more lists covering paperback and hardback sales in management and corporate strategy.


In short, on any given Sunday, it would be possible to identify as many as 200 different titles, fiction and non-fiction, across multiple genres, that had honestly earned the accolade "New York Times Bestseller."

Add all this up and project backwards into the earlier history of American publishing, and you will see that tens of thousands of books can legitimately claim the status of bestseller. Now most of them have completely disappeared, leaving barely a trace. Even the number one bestsellers of most years have become nothing more than answers to trivia questions, such as just 3 examples from the early 20th century:

To Have and To Hold by Mary Johnston in 1900,
The Harvester by Jean Stratton Porter in 1912
Soundings by A. Hamilton Gibbs in 1925

How to choose for this course, two dozen or so bestsellers from the vast library of possibilities? Peter has chosen books that include many familiar titles, yet only a few that have earned canonical status. This in turn leads to the next question in our exploration, the assumed distinction between serious and popular literature, which is often translated into a hierarchy of value. To put it bluntly, critics and many readers, often sort literature into contrasting compartments. Books that engage deeper questions and repay close study and rereading, on the one hand, versus books that provide transient entertainment on the other.

That distinction is not relevant to these lectures. Peter hopes to demonstrate that the books on this course's list, whatever their academic ranking, deserve consideration for several reasons. To begin with, they often provide access to the nation's social history, the customs, behavior, and daily life of more or less ordinary men and women, past and present.

In addition, since many of these books were written in response to particular events and movements, they can also shed light on our political history, such as:

the agitation over American independence,
the debate over slavery,
the place of women in society,
the plight of the poor and working class,
and so on.

In some cases, as we'll see, these books went beyond recording hot-button issues and intervened on behalf of change. Quite a few of the titles have been the center of literary or political controversy, a subject to which we'll return in each case. Finally, whether the word is considered praise or blame, many, and indeed, most of these books are exceptionally entertaining. They are page turners, to use a favorite phrase of reviewers. Indeed, to extend the crude distinction we mentioned a moment ago, it is taken for granted that popular books would be fun to read, while serious literature may not.

What else to best selling books share, beside their capacity for excitement? Is there a formula that can identify or perhaps even predict a bestseller? There is only one of these, which we'll sketch here and then come back to in the final lecture. Certain contemporary writers have become what are called in the trade, brands or even franchises. These are the writers whose names appear in larger print in their titles.

This has always been at least partly true. Pearl S. Buck and James Michener wrote dozens of bestsellers. If Margaret Mitchell had ever published a sequel to Gone with the Wind, it would undoubtedly have dominated the list. Indeed, when a sequel did appear, written after Mitchell's death, by someone else, it was he best selling novel of 1991.

Over the past few decades, the franchise author has become an ever larger presence on bestseller lists. Just about anything by John Grisham, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, or Danielle Steel, will sell millions of copies, forst in hardcover, then in paperback.

Yet another and related change, the numbers of copies a book must sell to qualify as a bestseller, has grown exponentially over the years. Sir Walter Scott was almost certainly the best selling novelist on either side of the English speaking Atlantic during the first years of the 19th century. Scott probably sold 10,000 copies of each of his books.

Yet a century later, Gone with the Wind sold an unprecedented million copies in its first six months. Today, initial print runs can exceed a million, and total sales can go much higher. Dan Brown's website claims that the Da Vinci Code has sold over 40 million copies, and Peter has no reason to doubt the number. The drawing power of superstar authors is one of the reasons that sales in seven figures have become almost commonplace. Beyond that, there is simply no formula that assures the popularity of any fiction or non-fiction book.

Many years ago, Bennett Cerf, the legendary editor at Random House, was asked what subject would produce a guaranteed bestseller? His famous reply, "Lincoln's doctor's dog." Lincoln is always a magnet for readers, ditto medical yarns, ditto again in tales of dogs, so why not put them together? Cerf knew a lot about selling books, and he also knew he was making a joke.

Despite the daydreams of agents, publishers, and writers themselves, there is simply no assured path to literary popularity. Indeed, several of the writers in this course had trouble finding a publisher. The gossip of the book trade includes countless sad stories about the big one that got away from some editor.

Nonetheless, the history of American book publishing does allow us to note a few patterns. For example, certain types of fiction, sometimes referred to as genre novels, repeatedly turn up. Mytery stories, westerns, historical romances, and harlequin romances, always have been well-represented on lists of popular books, along with political thrillers and tales of upward mobility. In the course of these lectures we'll have occasion to illustrate most of these genres with at least one text.

Over time, each genre tends to divide into specialized subcategories. Mystery stories for instance, come in both country house and police procedural flavors. Each of those large groupings has its local variance. The tough white-guy sleuth has been joined by the tough white-gal. Both now share space on the shelf with detectives of both sexes who are African American, Native American, Asian American, gay and lesbian, and immigrant.

Similar variety and mutations can be traced across most of the popular genres. Historical romances can be classed by period and region. The American Revolution and the Civil War have been extremely fruitful for this genre, and the south has long been home to a thriving industry in historical fiction.

Subjects also change over time, as Cold War thrillers went out of business with the end of the Cold War, to be replaced by thrillers about terrorism or global warming. The persistence of genres and of their non-fiction counterparts, especially self-help biography and memoir, tells us something about the making of bestsellers and about the book trade more generally.

Many books resemble comfort food, offering the security of familiar plots, character types, and even settings. Many od us may be willing to confess a weakness for one or another kind of genre fiction. Peter's own confession is an unquenchable appetite for mystery stories, preferably of the country house variety, and he knows just how unfashionable this habit is.

When we discuss Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon (1930), Peter will cheerfully quote from Raymond Chandler's contemptuous assessment of these artificial puzzle stories. Yet he won't stop reading them!

Genre is a species of marketing and marketing matters, which is not a new phenomenon. Newspaper and magazine advertising has been a feature of book launches for a long time. In passing we also note that all books, whether considered as works of art or potboilers, are embedded in commerce. James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) a seldom read masterpiece, considered the epitome of high culture, continues to produce many thousands of dollars, pounds, and euros each year. The copyright is fiercely protected by Joyce's heirs.

Mainstream bookselling was transformed by 1926, when a man named Harry Scherman founded the book of the month club. His scheme was a work of genius. A panel of high profile judges selected a single title from the hundreds of new books published each month, then offered to the club members as the month's main selection, arriving by mail, accompanied by a brochure, detailing the many virtues of the choice.

The process spared readers the burden of choosing among the huge number of new titles on offer. It also provided entry into a virtual community of other, and perhaps like-minded readers. They key was volume, because the club's executives bought in large quantities, and could demand deep discounts for specially printed editions. Part of the discount was passed along to members, thus making the books cheaper.

The rest of the money was added to an accumulating profit that made the club an exceptionally lucrative enterprise, with receipts that continued to grow even though the Great Depression. For generations, authors and publishers knew that sales would multiply, perhaps many times, it a title were chosen as a main selection of the club.

The book of the month club itself, became a major brand in the industry. Over the successive decades, dozens of other clubs often specialized by genre, joined Sherman's original organization. The history club, the mystery club, the cookbook club, and so on.

Commencing in the 1990s, Oprah's book club, permanently altered the concept and reach of a business that had been limited to the US Post Office and newspaper ads. Powered by the charisma and enthusiasm of its host, Oprah's book club, promised to being book talk into any household with a television. The consequences have been enormous, whether classic or contemporary, the books chosen almost automatically enjoy sudden and stunning sales. In the course of her programming, Winfrey has single-handedly put Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877), Faulkner's Light in August (1950), Pearl Buck's The Good Earth (1931), and Elie Wiesel's Night (1958), on the bestseller list, the latter two for the second time. We'll return to Oprah Winfrey in the final lecture.

Literary prizes can also fuel sales, though this presents a more complicated calculus. The Pulitzer prizes were established in 1917, and have always enjoyed considerable prestige with the reading public. Ostensibly the Pulitzer is intended to honor quality not popularity. Nonetheless a good many bestsellers, including a good many on our list, were Pulitzer winners:

The Good Earth (1931)
Gone with the Wind (1936)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
John Adams (2001)

Along with book clubs and book prizes, systematic sales campaigns go back at least to the 1930s. Product tie-ins, celebrity endorsements, and even contests have been deployed in a tireless effort to bring novels and books of non-fiction to the public's attention. These exertions have increased in recent decades when far more new books compete for space and attention each year, than was true in the 19th century or even the first half of the 20th. Keep this in mind, over 100,000 new titles now appear each year in the US alone, of an estimated one million worldwide.

The past few decades have brought two of the most significant changes the bookselling business has seen in its long history, the big-box bookstore and the internet. Prior to the advent of Borders and Barnes & Noble, bookstores tended to be small, independent shops. They offered personal service, often provided by a staff of booklovers. Yet at their largest, they were typically medium-sized spaces and could only offer a tiny sample of the new books published in any given month or season.

The hyperstores as they are sometimes called, moved books into huge palaces of print. Borders and Barnes & Noble can stock thousands of titles, rather than hundreds. They also provide a host of peripheral amenities, coffee shops, comfy chairs, wireless computer connections, music and film sections, even bathrooms. Publishers now compete for placement, capturing space near the entrances or checkouts for their displays of favored new titles.

The internet has generated the other new innovation that has revolutionized the book business, such as Amazon.com and its many imitators. Literally millions of titles now change hands each year without the intervention of any traditional book dealer at all. It only takes a computer and a credit card. Internet publishing has also begun to have an impact on the book trade, though so far with marginal results. However, stay tuned for more this one.

One final distinction before we briefly introduce the specific titles in the course. American taste has reached out to books from other countries as well. In fact, some of the bestselling authors of the past 150 years or so, have been foreign, usually English:

Charles Dickens and William Thackeray in the 19th century,
Arthur Conan Doyle across the turn of the century,
Agatha Christie and J.K. Rowling in the 20th century,

These few examples given have collectively sold tens of millions of copies to US readers. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, the first book ever identified as a bestseller in the US, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, was a Scottish import. Peter just wanted to say that title again!

We've chosen books by American authors for this course. A steady focus on native writers provides a greater opportunity to examine some of the cultural and historical issues that link imaginative literature to the texture of its time. The lectures will follow a general chronological sequence, beginning with the first book published in the English-speaking New World, the Bay Psalm Book (1640), and concluding with contemporary popular literature.

The chronological order will also help in tracing the permutations that mark certain themes and questions as they recur. Without pressing too hard on cause and effect, we'll move back and forth from literary texts to their social and political contexts. We'll also offer some comparisons between the texts themselves. Most of the lectures will take a single text as their principle focus. The exposition of those books will combine a lose reading of literary techniques, with an exploration of each book's major themes.

The diversity of the reading will itself demonstrate how spacious the category of bestseller has proven to be. Furthermore, whether or not the featured books have earned a permanent place in the critical sortings of later decades, and indeed several of them have, all of them will provide rich material for analysis and reflection.

Most of the works included are fiction, with the exceptions of the Bay Psalm Book (1640),
Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776), which helped to shape colonial opinion in favor of independence, and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), a founding work in the ubiquitous self-help genre. Also, near the end of the course, are examples of memoir and biography, two of the staples of popular non-fiction books.

The earliest novels in the list is James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), the most popular work by America's first bestselling novelist, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, put human faces on the struggle against slavery. It was almost certainly the bestselling American novel of the 19th century.

Three more 19th century bestsellers follow, Ragged Dick (1868), the first of over a hundred novels by Horatio Alger Jr., who popularized a version of the American Dream. Then Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1870), which remains a much loved and widely read account of the American family. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was the bestselling novel by the man who became the country's most popular writer and one of its most famous citizens.

The titles for the early 20th century include Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), which more or less invented the western as a major American genre. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905), a bestselling book about New York society that has also established itself securely in the canon of American literature, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), a scarifying account of abuses in Chicago's meatpacking industry.

Some of the most popular American novels were published in the 1920s and 30s. The first selection here was Main Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis, which declared war on the small town. At the turn of the decade, Dashiell Hammett published his classic crime novel The Maltese Falcon (1930), which will be used to illustrate the centrality of the detective story, a major fictional genre in American literature. Then The Good Earth (1931), by Pearl Buck, a pioneering account of life in rural China, is still a widely read book. The same is true for two other popular novels of the 1930s, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), the bestselling novel of its time, and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which a family of displaced farmers poignantly embodied the sufferings of the Great Depression decade.

Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) was the first bestselling novel by an African-American, and the first that was selected by the book of the month club. J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951) remains a byword for adolescent discontent, while Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) provides a different sort of dissent, in this case one of the most popular anti-war novels in American literature. Sales of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) remain strong. The book, which dramatized the national debate over civil rights at a moment of profound change, is often included on high school reading lists.

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1975) was the first book by an Asian-American writer to make the bestseller lists. It is still widely read, and recently identified as the text most frequently assigned in college-level English courses. It also deserves attention as the example of the memoir, which has become one of the mainstays of American popular writing in the past decade or so.

Biographies have enjoyed a long history of success in American publishing. To provide entry into this important genre, we'll discuss David McCullough's phenomenally successful life of John Adams (2001). Three million copies were sold, even prior to the HBO mini-series, making it certainly the bestselling biography in American literary history.

The final lecture, "Recent Bestsellers," will provide a survey of the authors and books that have dominated the lists over the past few decades. That lecture will elaborate on some topics mentioned earlier, franchise writers and recent changes in the marketing of books.

As we proceed in the course we'll discuss the distinctive qualities and particular accomplishments of each book, along with the recurrence of certain themes, among hem the meaning of America, the idea of success, the complex questions of race and gender, and the prominence of religion, among others. Whenever we can do so, we'll also try to answer the question of why this particular book was so popular?