In one of Manhattan's biggest bookshops, a salesman gestured cynically toward his Christmas customers. "Give them a fat historical novel and they'll trample every good book in the place to get to it." It was a familiar moan in the book business—even when the moaner had to raise his voice to be heard above his booming cash register. Yet as a summary for 1949 the judgment was too jaundiced. It was true that popular puddings were as plentiful as usual, with old practitioners like Frank Yerby, Marguerite Steen and F. van Wyck Mason tirelessly serving them up. But 1949 was also a year in which there were more good books in more fields than the U.S. public has had for several years past.
There were no skyrocket bursts of great, fresh genius, and among the novelists many an old hand had shown a faltering touch. But 1949's books, fiction and nonfiction, accurately and often brilliantly reflected the state of man and his world. They were books colored by personal questioning, confusion and discontent; but also showing through was a determination to express both personal and public dilemmas and to face them firmly. More than in recent years, fiction in 1949 leavened its cynicism with compassion. In a great deal of nonfiction, skepticism was tempered with American optimism: though happiness and order might have to be earned, they were not irrevocably beyond reach.
As the year drew toward its close, a wacky picture book, White Collar Zoo, stood at the head of the non-fiction bestsellers, and a vastly overrated picaresque novel with a panoramic ancient setting, The Egyptian, ruled the current fiction roost. One was a good-natured freak, the other an escape hatch, and neither of them was a suggestive commentary on the year's literary inventory.