I saw this post quite awhile ago but haven’t had a chance to come back to it until now. Although it might be easy to look at this I think “Man, we suck so much today; back in the day people read good books.” This particular comparison might suggest that, but there’s nothing unique to our age about the most popular books lacking intellectual vigor, nor should we assume our time will be primarily remembered for books about Christian vampires.

CASE IN POINT:  The most popular American books of the mid-19th century and really most of that century were more or less the Lifetime Channel movies of their day. Now referred to as “sentimental literature,” these novels more less told predictable tales of quiet young women enduring evil stepmothers or fathers who are in the end rescued by some Prince Charming-type.

What’s that you say? You’ve never heard of Maria Susanna Cummins and her debut novel The Lamplighter? Well it sold something like 100,000 copies when it was published in 1854. Meanwhile the books from that period that we now read and consider to be classics, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s  The Scarlet Letter sold around 10,000 in 1850 and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick barely sold 1,000 upon its appearance in 1851 (if I remember correctly from class.) In fact most of the works from this period that we still read were failures upon initial publication (another example: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass) while almost no one reads what was popular at the time (although this is quickly changing in grad school classrooms)

So while I’m not excited to see tales of Mormon bloodsuckers with ridiculous character names like “Bella Swann” on top of the bestseller list, I’m confidant that history will remember our age’s more substantial work and forget the drivel pumped out by Dan Brown and his ilk.

dalasverdugo:

sharingtime:

From Amazon today:

1. Conservatism
2. Da Vinci Code 2 
3. Vampires
4. Vampires
5. Inspirational Christian novel
6. Vampires
7. Vampires (by a different author than the other 3)
8. Set of four books… about vampires
9. Pop-science
10. Vampires

Publishers Weekly from 1961:

1. The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
2. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. Mila 18 by Leon Uris
5. The Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins
6. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
7. Winnie Ille Pu by Alexander Lenard (translation of Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne)
8. Daughter of Silence by Morris West
9. The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor
10. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck