It has become fashionable in recent years for critics to sigh for the lost glories of the good old days. Most of them could still remember the tingle of the '205. Where today was anything to compare with Hemingway, Dos Passes, Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson and the rest of that brave band, young & strong? Actually, the years were few when all these writers were at their best. And the fact is that 1948 has been a pretty good literary year. For the first time since the end of the war, U.S. letters has shown signs of revival.
In 1948 a new crop of talented young novelists appeared (always a good sign), and there was a fair showing from the old hands; non-fiction was sounder and solider than in 1946 or 1947. Historical novels still dominated the bestseller lists most of the year, but serious fiction, especially war novels, was giving them a run for their money. As the summer drew to a close, the late Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman's Peace of Mind, after months of leadership, had been replaced by Dale Carnegie's more practical guide to the same end, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Even so, a surprising number of better books had climbed up among the top moneymakers.
Yet as the books (on the whole) got better, book sales got worse. Sales were off as much as 15% from 1946. Norman Mailer's The Naked and The Dead topped the fiction bestseller lists for 18 weeks, but sold only 130,000 copies.
One literary event pleased just about everyone: T. S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize. Long admired by fellow writers, Eliot was honored for "pioneering work in modern poetry." Most agreed that he had more than earned the honor.
FICTION
Nobody wrote the "Great War Novel" that everybody has taken for granted ever since V-day. But a few writers did try to record their personal experiences, particularly young (25) Norman Mailer, a Pacific veteran whose The Naked and The Dead, a rugged, stormy first novel, whirled straight to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there. Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions also made a great splash, though with far less literary justification.
Appreciated but less popular were John Cobb's* scrutiny of U.S.A.A.F. men & manners in wartime England, The Gesture (also a first novel), James Gould Cozzens' Guard of Honor, an admirable study of base life at a U.S. flying field, and Theodor Plievier's gruesome Stalingrad, a broad-scale battle picture whose forceful "documentary" slant made it more fact than fiction.
Unsuccessful Hunting. Nobody harpooned the even more mythical white whale known as the "Great American Novel." Indiana's Ross Lockridge (who later committed suicide) made a stab at it; he brought home a huge, Ulysses-like animal named Raintree County, which was hailed by critics as a monumental attempt and then floated away in an embarrassed silence. Silence was the kindest treatment of Remembrance Rock, Carl Sandburg's large, muddled, impassioned effort to learn lessons for the future from a study of the American past.