The vagaries of literary fame

My post about Homage to Catalonia produced many interesting responses, including an email from a scholar who tells me that Orwell’s beliefs at the time about the actual role of the USSR in the war were mistaken (I’m no expert on the Spanish civil war even though my parents were direct and indirect refugees from it respectively, so I have no opinion in this particular detail per se), as well as various commenters quibbling about my statement that it’s one of his less well-known books. This statement is, on reflection, somewhat misleading, unless the category of Orwell’s better-known books is limited to 1984 and Animal Farm. Indeed at this point Homage to Catalonia might possibly be his third-best known book, with the other contenders being The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris in London. But this is all rather academic in the worst sense of the word, in that the third-best known Orwell book is like the third-best known Stendhal novel, in that he’s one of those writers who produced a couple of books that literate people have read or at least heard of, and a lot of others that are almost completely unknown even as titles to everyone but specialists on the subject.

In any event Andrew Gelman, who shares my fascination with the subject of the vagaries of fame — if you were to read only one post of the 6,700 I’ve authored on this blog, it should be the one inspired by our colloquy on Fred Bonine, one of the most famous people ever from Niles, Michigan — informs me that Homage to Catalonia sold less than 700 (!) copies in the first six months after its publication in 1937, and had still sold less than 1,500 copies at the time of Orwell’s death thirteen years later. One thing that fascinates me is how Orwell became Extremely Famous because 1984 was selected by Time-Life as its Book of the Month club when this in itself was a huge deal in terms of at least short-term literary fame — this was more or less the Oprah Book Club of that era. 1984 was published just nine months before Orwell’s death at the age of 46, and although Animal Farm had gotten a good deal of attention four years earlier he was still, prior to the fantastic commercial and literary success of his last book, a pretty obscure figure in literary let alone more general cultural terms.

1984, which was wildly misinterpreted at the height of the cold war as some sort of tract in defense of Freedom and the American Way as opposed to Godless Communism (historical trivia alert: in an at the time completely obscure little essay Orwell actually coined the term “cold war”), changed all that, so today everyone who is capable of reading a book has at least heard of Orwell, so well over six percent of the general population in other words.

Now what strikes me about this is howHomage to Catalonia, which, whatever quibbles one might have about the precise accuracy of the historical analysis of one antifa soldier’s impressions on the front lines of the Aragon front in 1937, is certainly one of the best books written about one of the most important events of the 20th century, and was read by quite literally almost nobody, and then completely forgotten, until many years after its publication, and how easily it could have remained that way if not for Orwell’s — itself highly contingent — sudden fame at the very end of his life.

Fifteen years ago, Gelman wrote about the best-selling books, fiction and non-fiction, from 1895 through 1965, as compiled by a contemporary researcher (something which should be noted in this context is that publishing sales figures have always been notoriously unreliable, or at least were prior to the magic of BookScan and the like, but that’s really not very important if we’re talking about whether a book sold three or four or five million copies, since all those figures represent A Historically Gigantic Best Seller).

The whole list is pretty fascinating, at least to people who are as obsessed with this general topic as we are, but here’s the one detail that most struck me: the authors who had the most total titles on the 70 — I think this should be 71 — annual lists of the best selling books in each individual year:

The authors who have had the most titles on the seventy annual lists are Mary Roberts Rinehart with eleven, Sinclair Lewis with ten, Zane Grey and Booth Tarkington with nine each, and Louis Bromfield, Winston Churchill (the American novelist), George Barr McCutcheon, Gene Stratton Porter, Frank Yerby, Edna Ferber, Daphne du Maurier, and John Steinbeck with eight each.

I have literally never heard of Mary Roberts Rinehart. And I don’t mean Kim Kardashian literally, I mean literally literally. And she’s Numero Uno on this entire list! For the rest:

Sinclair Lewis. I know a lot about him, have read a couple things he wrote, but not It Can’t Happen Here, which under present circumstances is a lacuna in my literary history I should remedy (did you know that using words like lacuna makes the average person feel bad, which then turns him into a fascist, because of all the Elitism? So sorry about that).

Zane Grey: I think he wrote westerns. Maybe Reagan liked him? I have now reached the limits of my Zane Grey knowledge bank, which does not include, as far as I know, having ever read a word he wrote.

Booth Tarkington: Name is familiar in the most vague way possible. Can’t even say what his genre was though. I mean I don’t think I could have been confident that he was even a writer if I didn’t see him on this list. If you had told me gossip columnist in early 20th century New York I would have said oh yeah I’ve heard the name.

Louis Bromfield. Total blank, same as Mary Robert Rinehart. Not even a name I could say I remember hearing.

Winston Churchill. OK this one is particularly notable/funny. One of the five best selling novelists of the first half of the 20th century in America was named Winston Churchill, and it’s not that Winston Churchill! And I had no idea this other Winston Churchill even existed, let alone having read anything he wrote.

George Barr McCutcheon. Again, total blank, zero, nothing. I remember Lawrence McCutcheon was a fine running back for the Los Angeles Rams in the 1970s. That’s all I’ve got on this one.

Gene Stratton Porter. Same thing. WTF? I consider myself what Orwell would have referred to as a literary gent, and I have simply never heard of any of these people. And they are the best selling authors of a period of American history in which I was actually alive, although only for the last five years, but still.

Frank Yerby. Ditto.

Edna Ferber. Thank god I have heard of her. I thought I was taking crazy pills there for a minute. Have I read anything by her? Maybe a short story in high school or something. Damn this is getting embarrassing. ETA: my brother just texted me that Ferber was actually born in Kalamazoo, where I am at the moment. Circle of life or something.

Daphne du Maurier. Mysteries, right? Please tell me at least I got the genre this time. Another in the “I could tell you she wrote novels but that’s it” category.

John Steinbeck. Whew! Have read at least three of his books and some of his journalism too!

One other funny detail from Gelman’s post: Among the best selling single titles of this 70 year period of American publishing history areLady Chatterly’s Lover and Lolita, both of which are probably on the list because people thought they were purchasing legal pornography, at a time when that genre was difficult or impossible to acquire in much of America. (There is nothing even slightly pornographic inLolita. I can’t remember Lawrence’s novel well enough — I read it once 45 years ago — to say likewise but I would bet that the same is true, at least by Contemporary Standards of Decency).

All this inspires some other thoughts about Fame and the Literary Canon and so forth, that I’ll save for the new year. Let’s hope it’s a good one.