What would it profit a man to have read the bestselling books of 1953?
From the novels, he would soon have learned that good literary taste is not what keeps bookstores in business. Nearly half the big moneymakers were historical novels running the short gamut from the trashy to the commonplace, strong on sex, sadism and sometimes even history, but woefully weak as writing. There were a few well-carpentered time killers by such canny old hands as A. J. Cronin and James Hilton, an occasional thoughtful and readable story—James Michener's The Bridges at Toko-ri, Herman Wouk's The Came Mutiny, now in its third year of best-sellerdom—but not one new work of topflight fiction. The novels worth cheering about—and there were several in 1953—had relatively scant commercial success.
High among the nonfiction bestsellers were books of personal uplift and personal adventure, advice on golf, a couple of cartoon collections, Dr. Kinsey on the human female, and the life story of an unabashed bordello keeper who could probably tell Kinsey a thing or two, Polly Adler's A House Is Not a Home.
In the main trends of the year, non-fiction outsold fiction, children's books had a boom (notwithstanding their dully predictable tendency to preach good behavior in barnyard parables), and a lot of good reading continued to turn up more or less unheralded. Finally, for the second year in a row, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible sold more than 1,000,000 copies, to lead all other current books.*
FICTION
With a few exceptions, the top-selling novels of 1953 were set in the long ago and far away. Danish Novelist Annemarie Selinko's Désirée, a sentimental historical about the adventures of an early mistress of Napoleon, fought it out for first place for several months with a holdover from last year, Thomas Costain's The Silver Chalice. At the end, both were overhauled by a new edition of Lloyd Douglas' The Robe, which, boosted by the movie, recovered the top place on the list that it first won in 1943. With similar help from
Hollywood, James Jones's 1951 From Here to Eternity beat out James Hilton's Time and Time Again, Samuel Shellabarger's Lord Vanity, and A. J. Cronin's Beyond This Place. Jones's novel also had the year's biggest sale among the paperbacks, a reported 1,500,000 at 75¢ . Another war novel, Leon Uris' Battle Cry, got in among the hard-cover leaders with a crude, realistic story about marines who had the virtue —refreshing in fiction—of knowing what they were fighting for.
Happily, while the old hands were reworking old formulas, the year also saw a succession of unusually good first novels. Ovid Williams Pierce in The Plantation and Jefferson Young in A Good Man wrote stories about life in the South that were distinguished by grace, dignity and good writing. George Lanning joined their company with This Happy Rural Seat, a mature story about middle-aged Americans. James Baldwin became a new Negro writer to watch with Go Tell It on the Mountain, a powerfully lyrical novel about religious fervor and human isolation in Harlem.