Even in the hurricane days of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind there had never been anything like it. In the first three months of 1946, six new novels had each run up a score of more than half a million copies on the presses or in print.
The new Big Six: Daphne du Maurier's The King's General: 1,000,000 copies.
Gladys Schmitt's David the King: 825,000 copies.
Erich Maria Remarque's Arch of Triumph: 750,000 copies.
Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: 600,000 copies.
Frank Yerby's The Foxes of Harrow: 600,000 copies.
Elizabeth Metzger Howard's Before the Sun Goes Down: 600,000 copies.
The Big Six of 1946 had at least one...
