Silverman - The Book of the Month: Sixty Years of Books in American Life

The Book of the Month

Sixty Years of Books in American Life

Edited by Al Silverman

Preface

I first compiled these reviews, essays, articles, and author portraits to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Book-of-the-Month Club. It has now been thirty years since that auspicious occasion and much has changed, both within the Club itself and in the publishing industry at large. The power of literature to touch our lives remains as strong today as it was ninety years ago, however, as does the desire of readers everywhere to find the next great book.

For much of the twentieth century, no organization played a bigger role in that search than the Book-of-the-Month Club. I am pleased but not at all surprised to see that this selection of material drawn from the Clubs monthly News still stands as an entertaining and informative history of one of the most vibrant periods in American literature, from The Sun Also Rises to The Accidental Tourist. It is remarkable how so many of the books discussed within these pages have withheld the test of time. Rereading these pieces, I am reminded of the vital place in American culture held by this diverse and distinguished group of writers.

Favorite essays include Maxwell Perkins on the art of writing, Gore Vidals A Conversation with Myself, Harper Lee on Truman Capote, Ed Doctorow on Ragtime, Bill Styron discussing the literature that meant the most to him, Bill Zinsser on the American language, Philip Roth on madness, John P. Marquand on Norman Mailers The Naked and the Dead, and Bernardine Kieltys wonderful remembrance of Willa Cather, which concludes with the assessment: Like Flaubert she toiled for clarity and exactness, and, like him, achieved timelessness.

Fittingly, the first electronic edition of The Book of the Month is published by Open Road Integrated Media, whose catalog includes ebooks by many of the writers discussed in these pages, from the aforementioned William Styron and John P. Marquand to Walker Percy, Malcolm Lowry, Katherine Anne Porter, Irwin Shaw, and Peter De Vries. Open Roads mission to relaunch classic works in the digital age is in some ways a twenty-first-century update to Book-of-the-Month Club founder Harry Schermans original foray into publishing, the Little Leather Library of miniature classics. I like the symmetry of that, and I trust that readers of this new edition will not only find insights into literatures great practitioners and critics, but will also be encouraged to pick up (or download) copies of these enduring books.

Al Silverman

2015

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, Gods image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

J OHN M ILTON , Areopagitica

INTRODUCTION

Harry Scherman picked a good time to start a book club. It was 1926 and Hemingway was posing for a photograph with Joyce, Eliot, and Pound at Sylvia Beachs bookstore in Paris. Scott Fitzgerald was in Paris, too, with Zelda, waiting for The Great Gatsby, published the previous fall, to take off.

It seemed like a good year for everyone. Calvin Coolidge said so. The stock market was booming, and nobody was poor, and only the Lost Generation seemed disillusioned. But that was O.K., too; for the Lost Generation, as the critic John K. Hutchens said, it was creative disillusionment.

Popular art flourished in 1926 and, in some cases, became high art. Rudolph Valentino made his last film, Son of the Sheik; Buster Keaton starred in Battling Butler; Lillian Gish played Hester Prynne in a Swedish film of The Scarlet Letter; Ronald Colman was Beau Geste and John Barrymore was Don Juan. Martha Graham did her first dance solo at New Yorks 48th Street Theater, and Henry Moores draped figure was undraped for the public.

It was a vital year for books, too, though not quite as exciting as 1925 had been. The literary flow that year must have persuaded Harry Scherman to undrape his creation. In addition to Gatsby, the list of novels published in the United States included Theodore Dreisers An American Tragedy, John Dos Passoss Manhattan Transfer, Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway, the English translation of Thomas Manns Death in Venice, Liam OFlahertys The Informer, and new novels by Ellen Glasgow and Willa Cather. Pound wrote, It is after all a grrrreat littttttttterary period.

The rs and ts would have to be shortened for 26. The harvest was less rich and the poet Rilke had died. There were a lot of popular bestsellers, including Edna Ferbers Show Boat and Anita Looss Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. There was also an array of nonfiction bestsellers that could be smuggled onto todays bestseller list and nobody would know the difference: Diet and Health; a new edition of The Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fannie Farmer; Why We Behave Like Human Beings; Auction Bridge Complete; and The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. In that first year of the Book-of-the-Month Clubs life, only two books of the month were bestsellers: Show Boat and John Galsworthys The Silver Spoon. Not chosen as books of the month but recommended to the charter members of the Club were The Story of Philosophy and The Sun Also Rises.

Durant and Hemingway, as no other authors, thread their way through the sixty-year history of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Today, new generations of members are buying The Story of Philosophy as their parents and maybe their grandparents didmore than 300,000 copies have been distributed to members since 1960 alone. And Durants massive fifty-year undertaking, The Story of Civilization, accomplished in partnership with his wife, Ariel, is one of the most popular premiums of the Club. In book-club terminology, a premium is a book (in this case eleven books) that can be had for a minimal price by anyone willing to enroll in the club. Over the years a lot of people have been willing.

As for Hemingway, what began in 1926 remains alive in 1986. In February of 1926 Hemingway came to New York and switched publishers. Scribners was willing to publish his novel Torrents of Spring, a parody of Sherwood Anderson; Hemingways first publisher, Boni & Liveright, had turned it down. In April of that year, just as the Book-of-the-Month Club was emitting its first infant squeals, Maxwell Perkins of Scribners was reading the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises. And Hemingway, the man who, the French said, had broken the language, was on his way. In 1986, Hemingways last, unpublished novel, The Garden of Eden, became a Book of the Month.

Over the years Hemingways effect on the Club and its members has been persuasive in various ways. In 1985 Elmore Leonard, the Raymond Chandler of our time, spoke at the Detroit Institute of Art, a lecture sponsored by the Club for its members in the Detroit area. Leonard, who established his literary reputation late in life, told of BOMC books coming into the house, beginning in 1937. His older sister had joined the Club, and Leonard began to grab the books. He remembered reading