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Through most of 1950, sales of fiction lagged behind nonfiction. It was a reversal of the usual order, but a look at the novels provided at least a partial explanation. The Costains and the Yerbys had their moments, but not the gaudy ones of old, and even the Du Mauriers and the Cronins issued invitations to boredom. British Critic V. S. Pritchett feared that leisure had become so rare and expensive that creative writers no longer had a chance to do good work. But more than a lack of leisure was responsible for the famine: there was a lack of commanding talent among the new writers, and a drop in performance among the old.
The real disappointments of the year were among the big U.S. men of letters. Ernest Hemingway was still fuming at the critics who turned thumbs down on Across the River and into the Trees, but the critics were right (even though the book was currently selling between 2,000 and 3,000 copies a week). Its tone was that of a man who has had eight Martinis (or Montgomerys), who thinks the world is both terrible and wonderful, is surprised by his own brilliance and can't understand why slightly soberer people consider him appallingly dull.
John Steinbeck fared even worse, but made less fuss about his failure. His novelette, Burning Bright (produced also as a play that flopped), was a slick but transparently thin plea for universal love. Robert Penn Warren went back to his native Kentucky for a frontier novel of violence and tortured emotions, World Enough and Time. It had power and murkiness in about equal proportions.
At 71, Upton Sinclair showed that he was capable of a change of pace. Sticking to his promise to ditch his ubiquitous, ten-novel hero, Lanny Budd, he wrote Another Pamela; or, Virtue Still Rewarded, a sly gibe at rich, talky parlor liberals seen through the wide eyes of an ingenuous housemaid. His literary model: 18th Century Novelist Samuel Richardson's famed Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded.
Among U.S. top-division writers, Mississippi's William Faulkner had the best year. Over the protests of at least one Mississippi editor, the Jackson Daily News's Frederick Sullens, who still insisted that Faulkner belongs to the "garbage-can school," he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature. His Collected Stories, a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, demonstrated again that, at the top of his form, Faulkner is one of the very best U.S. writers of his generation.
Cardinals & Crackups. The year's most popular book, fiction or nonfiction, was a fat, slick novel about a young priest's spectacular rise in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Commonplace, often dull, Henry Morton Robinson's The Cardinal nevertheless found nearly 600,000 customers, of whom about three-fourths chose the paper-covered edition at $1.
John Hersey scored one of the year's popular successes with The Wall, a fictional-documentary study of the extermination of Warsaw's Jews under Hitler. Though its reporting devices got in its way as a novel, The Watt's story mosaic gave it a strong cumulative impact. In The Town, Conrad Richter finished a trilogy of fine, craftsmanlike novels about the Ohio Country pioneers. The trilogy put Richter in the first rank of historical novelists, though it started no stampede to the bookshops by fans of the frigate-bustle-&-bosom school.