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Five thousand copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were sold in one week. For the next year, eight presses ran day & night to keep up with the demand for what indignant Southerners called a manual for runaways.
Who were the authors of these best sellers? Many were clergymen who had left their pulpits (15% of all U.S. best sellers are the work of clergymen), some were newspapermen, or dentists like Zane Grey (over 15,000,000 copies). Inspiration was often vagrant : Elinor Glyn wrote Three Weeks after a visit to Venice, when "my head was a little turned, perhaps, by the amount of attention which almost all men except my husband gave me at that time." They often had to publish their first books themselves.
Classics Too. The quality of what the U.S. public reads has progressively declined, while the vast amount of tenth-rate fiction it devours has steadily increased. However, U.S. readers can be reasonably proud of their ancestors' critical judgment. Shakespeare's Plays, Bacon's Essays, The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, The Vicar of Wakefield, Paradise Lost, The Federalist, and most of the English classics were American best-sellers as soon as they were published in the U.S. In many cases the U.S. sale (because of cheap pirated editions) was greater than the sale in England.
After the terrific U.S. success of Pickwick Papers, Dickens made his American tour, and went through four months of adulation. Balls, dinners and crowds of beautiful women attended his progress. Few books have been as eagerly awaited as his American Notes for General Circulation. The advance sheets reached the U.S. early Monday morning, Nov. 6, 1842. Between 50,000 and 60,000 people were waiting to buy it in the first week that it appeared.
It was the most brazen slap in the face ever administered to a doting public. Dickens was fed up with the lionizing, the tobacco-chewing, spitting, and the piracy of his books, and said so. The effect may have been salutary for U.S. manners. But it ended for some time to come the enthusiasm for popular authors as public heroes.
-Books whose sale was 1% of the population of the time. Thus the 150,000 copies of Tom Paine's Common Sense, printed in 1776, was equivalent to 8,000,000 copies in 1946. Twenty-one best-sellers have sold over 2,000,000 copies. Among them: Ivanhoe, Ben-Hur, A Christmas Carol, Tom Sawyer, In His Steps, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Gone With the Wind, One World, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.