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Women and Romance. But romance was by no means neglected; women novelists wrote more than half of the year's bestsellers. Firm favorites were Elizabeth Goudge's Green Dolphin Street (winner of the $125,000 M.G.M. prize), Mazo de la Roche's The Building of Jalna, Margery Sharp's Cluny Brown, Betty Smith's holdover from 1943, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Two of 1944's most somber best-sellers were also by women: Lillian Smith's Boston-banned story of miscegenation in the South, Strange Fruit (475,000 copies), and Gwethalyn Graham's homely rebuff to Canadian antiSemitism, Earth and High Heaven (125,000 copies). So were three books that lagged in sales but scored with the critics: Katherine Anne Porter's collection of highly finished short stories, The Leaning Tower; Virginia Woolf's posthumous collection, A Haunted House (published three years after the author's suicide); First Novelist Jean Stafford's Boston Adventure, a stately, neo-Proustian examination of New England family life.
Good war fiction was scarce; the postwar flood was still to come. First Novelist John Hersey's A Bell for Adano made a clear sweep of critical and popular honors. Runners-up were Joseph Pennell's The History of Rome Hanks, a blood-&-guts story of the Civil War that proved too much for some stomachs, and, in complete contrast, Harry Brown's quiet, sensitive A Walk in the Sun.
Fiction surprise of the year was Charles Jackson's study of dipsomania, The Lost Weekend, which was both a warm and human (if terrible) story and a shrewd, meticulous case history. Even farther off the beaten track were Philip Wylie's Night Unto Night and Ludwig Bemelmans' Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (both with epileptic heroes); Painter Salvador Dali's first, richly insane venture in fiction, Hidden Faces; Robert Graves's attack on the venerable Poet John Milton, Wife to Mr. Milton; Dangling Man, Saul Bellow's tense study of the pins-&-needles period between a draftee's classification and induction; Australian Christina Stead's poignant story of feminine frustration, For Love Alone.
For many Old Faithfuls, 1944 was just another year, another stage of work in progress. In Everybody's Political What's What, 88-year-old Bernard Shaw demonstrated that his wit, if not his judgment, is as sharp as ever. Jules Romains published Work and Play, the 13th book of his vast, panoramic novel of France between wars, Men of Good Will; Upton Sinclair lifted Lanny Budd (who first appeared in World's End in 1940) to the stature of Presidential Agent; with Bedford Village, Hervey Allen completed Vol. 2 of his massive sextet on Colonial America.
Will It Last? World War I produced no U.S. book boom, but publishing slumped badly at war's end. Will the end of War II and gasoline rationing bring a slump in the present enormous and growing U.S. appetite for books? Presumably some G.I.'s who read now for lack of a better way to kill time, some civilians who read because gas rationing keeps them homebound, will turn to other pleasures in the peace. But the reading habits acquired by millions of others are unlikely to be broken. And the public appetite is certain to be fed and stimulated by mass production and distribution of books on an unprecedented scale.