A best-selling novel usually outsells a best-selling work of nonfiction, two to one. Last month Lin Yutang's philosophic miscellany of Chinese wisdom, The Importance of Living, was the only book that sold equally well in New York City and San Francisco, in Chicago and Dallas, Tex. And although its total sale fell slightly short of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling, it was head and shoulders above rivals in its own field, and the only work of non-fiction in the past season to sell on the scale of best-selling novels.
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