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History, past and current, was also a steady seller. Will Durant, the U.S.'s out standing popularizer, completed the third volume of his monumental history of civilization, Caesar and Christ. Charles & Mary Beard ended their long and fruitful collaboration with The Basic History of the United States. Britain's D. W. Brogan produced one of the most discerning studies of American life ever written by a foreigner, The American Character. Only a step below in popularity were John Dos Passos' State of the Nation, a brilliant survey of the U.S. home front; Dixon Wecter's When Johnny Comes Marching Home, a thoroughgoing survey of U.S. veterans after four wars; An American Program, the late, great Wendell Willkie's last statement of his credo.
Biography. Few of the many biographies of 1944 had American heroes. Gene Fowler's Good Night, Sweet Prince (John Barrymore) outsold them all, but the best books were about Europeans. Wittiest and deftest was Jean Burton's Heyday of a Wizard, the story of the Scottish-born medium, Daniel Dunglass Home. Most significant for today was H. Chang's massive, official Chiang Kaishek. Most unexpected was the abundance of works on the lives and writings of British authors of the 18th and 19th Centuries, including Joseph Wood Krutch's Samuel Johnson; Sheila Birkenhead's Against Oblivion (a life of Keats's friend Joseph Severn); Will D. Howe's Charles Lamb and His Friends.
Novels of Religion. Insofar as a pattern emerged, it was in the persistence of Biblical and religious themes like that of Joseph the Provider in the year's popular writing. Zofia Kossak's Blessed Are the Meek, based on the life of St. Francis of Assisi, was one of the most popular novels, and Lloyd Douglas' The Robe, a 508-page novel of primitive Christianity and a veteran of 1942, outstripped all rivals with a sale of 1,500,000 copies to date. A. J. Cronin's The Green Years, a study of a young Scottish boy's spiritual growing pains, got a prodigious first printing (100,000). British expatriate novelists in the U.S. appeared to be following a similar trend — with the difference that they turned toward Eastern religious philosophy and the transmigration of souls, strictly in modern dress. Two examples popular with U.S. readers : W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, in which a youthful American picks his way to the Absolute through a maze of delectable temptations; Aldous Huxley's sophisticated but mystical Time Must Have a Stop.