Best Selling Books of the 1920’s

The following is a list of the Number 1 bestselling books from 1920 to 1929 according to Publisher’s Weekly magazine. These books can readily be found in just about any used book store.

• The Man of the Forest by Zane Grey (1920)
• Main Street by Sinclair Lewis in (1921)
• If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchison (1922)
• Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton (1923)
• So Big by Edna Ferber (1924)
• Soundings by A. Hamilton Gibbs (1925)
• The Private Life of Helen of Troy by John Erskine (1926)
• Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis (1927)
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder ( 1928 )
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque ( 1929 )

Only one author achieved the Number 1 status twice in this decade. Sinclair Lewis in 1921 and 1927.

Jean Marie Auel – A Favorite of Mine

One of my absolute favorite authors is Jean M. Auel. Her historical fiction is so remarkably well written that you feel that you are truly there with pre-historic humans living life with them. She is a master in my eyes.

Jean Marie Auel was born in Chicago, Illinois on February 18, 1936. The second of five children of Neil Solomon Untinen, and Martha Wirtanen. Jean and her husband, Ray Bernard Auel, have five children and live in Portland, Oregon.

Auel has been a member of Mensa since 1964. She attended Portland State University and the University of Portland. While studying, she worked as a clerk (1965-1966), a circuit board designer (1966-1973), technical writer (1973-1974), and a credit manager at Tektronix (1974-1976). She earned an MBA in 1976 and has received honorary degrees from the University of Maine and Mount Vernon College for Women.

In 1977, Auel began extensive library research of the Ice Age for her first book. She joined a survival class to learn how to construct an ice cave, and learned primitive methods of making fire, tanning leather, and knapping stone from aboriginal skills expert Jim Riggs. Clan of the Cave Bear was nominated for numerous literary awards, including an American Booksellers Association nomination for best first novel.

After the success of the first book, Auel was able to travel to prehistoric sites and to meet many of the experts with whom she had been corresponding. Her research has taken her across Europe from France to Ukraine, including most of what Marija Gimbutas called Old Europe. She has developed a close friendship with Dr. Jean Clottes of France who was responsible for, among many other things, the exploration of the Cosquer Cave discovered in 1985 and the Chauvet Cave discovered in 1994.

Jean Auel’s books have been commended for their anthropological authenticity and their ethnobotanical accuracy.

Earth’s children Series:

1. The Clan of the Cave Bear, 1980
2. The Valley of Horses, 1982
3. The Mammoth Hunters, 1985
4. The Plains of Passage, 1990
5. The Shelters of Stone, 2002

Hoosier Author – Gene Stratton Porter

Gene Stratton-Porter (August 17, 1863 – December 6, 1924) was an American author, amateur naturalist, wildlife photographer, and one of the earliest women to form a movie studio and production company. She wrote some of the best selling novels and well-received columns in magazines of the day.

Born Geneva Grace Stratton in Wabash County, Indiana, she married Charles D. Porter in 1886, and they had one daughter, Jeannette.

She became a wildlife photographer, specializing in the birds and moths in one of the last of the vanishing wetlands of the lower Great Lakes Basin. The Limberlost and Wildflower Woods of northeastern Indiana were the laboratory and inspiration for her stories, novels, essays, photography, and movies. Although there is evidence that her first book was “Strike at Shanes”, which was published anonymously, her first attributed novel, The Song of the Cardinal met with great commercial success. Her novels Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost are set in the wooded wetlands and swamps of the disappearing central Indiana ecosystems she loved and documented. She eventually wrote over 20 books.

Although Stratton-Porter wanted to focus on nature books, it was her romantic novels that made her famous and generated the finances that allowed her to pursue her nature studies. She was an accomplished author, artist and photographer and is generally considered to be one of the first female authors to promulgate public positions — in her case, conserving the Limberlost Swamp.

Catherine Woolley, author of the “Ginnie and Geneva” series of children’s books, may have named her character of Geneva Porter after Geneva Stratton-Porter.

One of her last novels, Her Father’s Daughter, was set outside of Los Angeles, California where she had moved in the 1920s for health reasons and to expand her business ventures into the movie industry. This novel presented a unique window into Stratton-Porter’s personal feelings on WWI-era racism, especially relating to orientals. She died in Los Angeles in 1924, along with her driver, when her limousine was struck by a streetcar.

A building at Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, Indiana is named in her honor. A rest stop along the Indiana Toll Road (U.S. Interstate 90) also shares her name. Her Wildflower Woods home on Lake Sylvan, Rome City, Indiana, and her Limberlost home in Geneva, Indiana, are now museums operated by the Indiana State Museum.

Resource for information: Wikepedia

Harper Lee authored To Kill A Mockingbird

Nelle Harper Lee (born April 28, 1926) is an American novelist known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, her only major work. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom of United States for her contributions to literature in 2007.

Harper Lee, known as Nelle, was born in the Alabama town of Monroeville on April 28, 1926, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who served on the state legislature from 1926 to 1938. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote.

After graduating from high school in Monroeville, Lee enrolled at the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery (1944-45), and then pursued a law degree at the University of Alabama (1945-50), pledging the Chi Omega sorority. While there, she wrote for several student publications and spent a year as editor of the campus humor magazine, Ramma-Jamma. Though she did not complete the law degree, she studied for a summer in Oxford, England, before moving to New York in 1950, where she worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC.

Lee continued as a reservation clerk until the late 50s, when she devoted herself to writing. She lived a frugal life, traveling between her cold-water-only apartment in New York to her family home in Alabama to care for her father.

Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. The following month at the East 50th townhouse of her friends Michael Brown and Joy Williams Brown, she received a gift of a year’s wages with a note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” Within a year, she had a first draft. Working with J. B. Lippincott & Co. editor Tay Hohoff, she completed To Kill a Mockingbird in the summer of 1959. Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate bestseller and won great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It remains a bestseller with more than 30 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted “Best Novel of the Century” in a poll by the Library Journal.

Resource information obtained from Wikipedia

Bestselling Books from 1910 to 1919

I’ve compiled a list of the Number One bestselling books in the United States during the decade of 1910 to 1919. The book titles and their authors are listed by the year that they achieved the status of being the most popular book of that year.

• The Rosary by Florence L. Barclay (1910)
• The Broad Highway by Jeffrey Farnol (1911)
• The Harvester by Gene Stratton Porter (1912)
• The Inside of the Cup by Winston Churchill (1913)
• The Eyes of the World by Harold Bell Wright (1914)
• The Turmoil by Booth Tarkington (1915)
• Seventeen by Booth Tarkington (1916)
• Mr. Britling Sees It Through by H. G. Wells (1917)
• The U.P. Trail by Zane Grey ( 1918 )
• The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1919)

Only one author, Booth Tarkington, achieved two different number one bestsellers during this decade. Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and attended both Purdue and Princeton Universities.

Many of these books can be found in used book stores both on line and in your local area.

Bestseller List of Books from 1900 to 1909

During the decade of 1900 to 1909 the following books were the Number 1 Bestsellers in the United States. I’ve listed them by the year that they reached that status along with the author.

• To Have And To Hold by Mary Johnston in 1900
• The Crises by Winston Churchill (American Author) in 1901
• The Virginian by Owen Wister in 1902
• Lady Rose’s Daughter by Mary Augusta Ward in 1903
• The Crossing by Winston Churchill (American author) in 1904
• The Marriage of William Ashe by Mary Augusta Ward in 1905
• Coniston by Winston Churchill -American Novelist in 1906
• The Lady of the Decoration by Frances Little in 1907
• Mr. Crewe’s Career by Winston Churchill (American novelist) in 1908
• The Inner Shrine by Basil King in 1909

It is interesting to see that Winston Churchill, the American novelist and not the English statesman, had 4 No. 1 Bestsellers in this 10 year span.

In future posts, I’ll see if I can review any of these books written 100 years ago.

She Who Remembers by Linda Lay Shuler 1988

I have to say right off the bat that this is one of my all time favorite books! I’m a real sucker for good historical fiction and Linda Lay Shuler grabbed me on the first page back in 1988. I could hardly put the book down until I had read the last page. Once I had completed the novel, I found myself almost sad that the I wouldn’t be following Kwani anymore. To me, that is the definition of a good fiction author, no matter what genre they are writing in. If they grab you in the first paragraph and you find yourself missing the main character after you have finished the book, you’ve found a good author. I’ve since read all three of Shuler’s titles and she captivated me in each one.

Published in 1988 She Who Remembers was Shuler’s first novel. The story is in the American Southwest in the 13th century with Kwani a young member of the Anasazi tribe as the main character. She is believed to be a witch by her own people and is rescued by Kokopelli and taken to the cliff dwellings of the Eagle Clan where she eventually becomes the revered woman known as She Who Remembers.

According to my research there were 50,000 copies in the first printing of this book by Macmillan. It has been reprinted a few times and can be found most commonly in paperback form.

If you are looking for a great read and you love historical fiction, I can highly recommend this book. You might find a copy to read in one of these online book stores:

Books in Rockford

The Brookings Book Company

Books by the Sea

Meredith Nicholson – Indiana Golden Age Author

Meredith Nicholson (1866–1947) was an important figure in Indiana’s “Golden Age” of literature, which extended roughly from 1880 to 1920. One of the “Big Four” writers—with James Whitcomb Riley, George Ade, and Booth Tarkington—Nicholson authored twenty-eight books, all but two of which were published between 1903 and 1929, a period in which he wrote full time. Most of these works were best-selling novels, but he also produced a history, a book of short stories, four collections of essays, two books of poetry, and a co-authored play. His third novel, The House of a Thousand Candles (1905), a thrilling adventure/mystery story set in northern Indiana, was by far his most popular and most successful book. Translated into five languages and still in print today, it has sold more than half a million copies.

In 1929, however, Nicholson’s writing stopped, apparently as a result of the financial devastation experienced by the family in the stock market collapse. Soon afterwards, Nicholson suffered an even greater loss in the death of his beautiful and talented wife, Eugenie, who had been his inspiration and helpmeet throughout his writing years. Jobless, nearly destitute, and forced in 1931 to give up his home on North Meridian Street, Nicholson’s prospects at the outset of the Great Depression seemed dim indeed. A lifelong Democrat who had been active behind the scenes in the campaigns of others, Nicholson turned for help to his political friends who came into power at that time. Nicholson’s longtime friend and personal physician, Dr. Carleton B. McCulloch—who was also a former gubernatorial candidate and current chairman of the Democratic state committee—became his chief promoter. McCulloch enlisted the help of their mutual friend, future governor Paul V. McNutt. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who knew Nicholson only by reputation, responded to their entreaties with the offer of a diplomatic appointment to Paraguay. As a result, at the age of 66, Nicholson began a new career as a diplomat. Although surprisingly successful, his years abroad would prove star-crossed. After a transfer to a more favorable post in Venezuela in 1935, Nicholson found the rising path of his new career suddenly veering downward under mysterious circumstances in 1938 with his demotion to Nicaragua. It was there, in 1941, that he decided to end his service abroad. Nicholson’s nearly eight years as an American diplomat began in October 1933. No known record explains his selection for the Paraguayan mission: he seemed to be both a deserving and qualified candidate for this remote and low-profile position. A month of “instruction” at the State Department provided the new diplomat with general details of the situation in Paraguay and taught him the basic protocols for a minister of his rank. Then, literally on the eve of his departure, Nicholson married his secretary, Dorothy Wolfe Lannon, of Marion, Indiana. This action proved fateful, both in terms of Nicholson’s initial success in dealing with Latin Americans and, more ominously, in terms of his subsequent demotion.

Taken from an article by Ralph D. Gray published in the Indiana Magazine of History December 2006
Indiana Magazine of History

Doctor Zhivago #1 Bestseller in 1958

In 1958, fifty years ago, Dr. Zhivago was the bestselling book of the year. Boris Pasternak’s novel fits both in historical fiction and as romance novel taking place during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War during 1918-1920. It outlines the struggle of a man whose life is dramatically changed and torn apart by forces beyond his control. There was much controversy with the Soviet Union when Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature partly for his novel. Pasternak rejected the award so as not to cause unrest in his homeland. The book was made into a movie in 1965. A moving story of love and war is a classic that everyone should read.

Possible places to order this book online:

The Paper Trail

Through The Magic Door

The Museum of Broadcast Communications

Elizabeth Moon – A Science Fiction Author

Elizabeth Moon, born March 7, 1945 is an author of both American Science fiction and fantasy novels. She grew up in McAllen, Texas. In 1969 she married Richard Sloan Moon.

She served in the US Marine Corps where she attained the rank 1st Lieutenant during her active service. She has a Bachelor’s degree in History and also obtained a B.A. in Biology. Moon started writing as a child and at the age of six she attempted her first book. She began writing Science Fiction in her teens.

Elizabeth first became serious about her writing in her mid-thirties. Her first novel was The Sheepfarmer’s Daughter . Most of her books have a military science fiction theme.

One of her series that is a favorite of mine is the Vatta’s War series.

A few titles by this author:

• Trading In Danger
• Change of Command
• Generation Warriors
• Surrender None

A few online book shops that carry Elizabeth Moon Books:

The Paper Trail

Baen Books

Heartland Digs & Finds