Bestselling Books in the 1950s

A list of the Number 1 bestselling books during the decade of the 1950’s according to Publisher’s Weekly magazine. These books are readily found in used book stores, garage sales, estate sales, and websites.

1950 – The Cardinal by Henry Morton Robinson

1951 – From Here To Eternity by James Jones

1952 – The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain

1953 – The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas

1954 – Not As A Stranger by Morton Thompson

1955 – Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk

1956 – Don’t Go Near The Water by Willima Brinkley

1957 – By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens

1958 – Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

1959 – Exodus by Leon Uris

Amazingly no authors during this decade had any repeat #1 bestsellers or more than one book receiving the acclaim of most popular book.  Many of these books were made into movies, however.

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

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