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The year's bestselling novel was James Jones's From Here to Eternity, an aggressively immature first book, powerfully but poorly written, that voiced the gripes of the pre-Pearl Harbor regular soldier. By some it was credited with being a reaffirmation of human dignity; it was, at least as much, an exercise in uncontrolled resentment. Another first novel, William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, showed more accomplished writing, but its tired theme of Southern disintegration and its synthesis of several.identifiable styles left Styron a doubtful quantity. Less ambitious in scope but more certain in their intent were two original novels of genuine talent. J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was a sketchy but endearing study of an adolescent. In many ways, Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman was one of the most successful U.S. novels of the year, a perfectly controlled, remarkably well-written account of a college girl's descent into schizophrenia. Another penetrating look at adolescence was James Agee's The Morning Watch, a symbol-laden, poetically written story of a schoolboy's fervor on Good Friday.
Surprises & Comedowns. Several of the big names of U.S. fiction appeared in 1951, but weakly. Nobel Prizewinner William Faulkner found the lower rungs of the bestseller lists with Requiem for a Nun, a piece of second-best Faulkner in which the heroine of Sanctuary is brought back to sin some more but also to see a glimmering of atonement. John Marquand offered a new variant of his chronically bedeviled American male in Melville Goodwin, USA, but a lot of old Marquand enthusiasts were beginning to tire of the poor fellow, even in a general's costume. Writers such as John Dos Passes (Chosen Country) and John O'Hara (The Farmers Hotel) surprised their admirers with books of complete inconsequence, and Sinclair Lewis bowed out posthumously with a novel (World So Wide) about an uprooted American in Italy that it would have been a kindness to have left unpublished. For a young fellow with a success behind him, Norman (The Naked and the Dead) Mailer suffered a sharp comedown. His Barbary Shore, stuffed with petulant social consciousness, 1930s style, was both archaic and naive. That specialist in Southern eccentrics, Truman Capote, got himself and his characters up a tree in The Grass Harp, a whimsical exercise in erratic human relationships that became swamped in cuteness.