GOLDEN MULTITUDES (357 pp.)—Frank Luther Moft—Macmillan ($5).
Golden Multitudes is a history of American pipe dreams : a record of nearly three centuries of U.S. bestsellers. It is doubtful if there has ever been assembled any where such a comprehensive list of such complete irrationality, so many ridiculous scenes and characters, so much solemn nonsense and so much moralizing, posturing and ham acting, as in Frank Luther Mott's account of the books which the U.S. public has purchased by the millions.
Here are the orphan boys who stopped runaway horses and saved the lives of bankers' daughters; the parsons' wives who were captured by Indians (and 200 years later, the English lady who was kidnaped by a sheik) ; the soldiers of fortune, the prisoners of Zenda, the daughters of the regiment, the little shepherds of Kingdom Come; here are the ministers who gave up their pulpits and went into the slums or who, out in the great west, or in the north woods, found peace and pipe-smoking contentment far from the falsities of society. The book has something of the fascination that might be found in a catalogue of paste gems.
Author Mott, dean of the University of Missouri's famed journalism school, is not unduly critical of this rubbish. Caught up in the details of exaggerated advertising claims, dubious publishing records and the secretiveness of publishing houses about their sales figures, Dean Mott spends most of his book in an overly conscientious attempt to get at the exact facts about the 324 books he classes as bestsellers* (he excepts Bibles, textbooks, cookbooks). His book's great value is that it is the first thorough exploration into a field which seems much more mysterious the more it is looked into.
Amber Over Tokyo. Mott asks, but cannot answer, why the field of popular fiction has been so narrow. There have been no lastingly popular American novels on industry, the clipper ships, the rail roads, the Oregon Trail, immigration, the discovery of gold or oil, the movies, radio, or the New Deal. Readers could get good, solidly based historical novels on the fall of Rome or the battle of Waterloo, but not of the Lewis & Clark expedition.
In the days of the railroad builders, U.S. readers got St. Elmo and Under Two Flags. When the clipper ships were sailing to China, one of the popular novels was The Scarlet Letter. When the wagon trains were going over South Pass, it was Swiss Family Robinson. The year before Japan fell, it was Forever Amber.
Trainload of Tears. Uncle Tom's Cabin, one best-seller which did speak to its day, began originally as a magazine serial. A prospective book publisher, reading it then, became alarmed at its length, and warned Harriet Beecher Stowe that he could not afford to publish a two-volume work. She offered to end it then & there. The magazine polled its readers, who insisted that it continue. One of the first readers was Congressman Philip Greeley. Reading it on the train to Washington, he realized that his tears were attracting the attention of the other passengers. At last he left the train, rented a hotel room in Springfield, Mass., where he could read and weep to his heart's content.