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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we continue our centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things today, thing number 96, bestsellers, a decade-by-decade look at what books Americans were reading and what that might say about American culture over the century. To talk about this, we're joined by Tina Jordan, deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review and co editor of The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History. She's pulled out some selections from the lists for us to talk about. Tina, thanks so much for doing this with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Tina Jordan: Thank you. This is my pleasure. This is something I'm really interested in.

Brian Lehrer: Is 125 years the length of time that The Times has had a bestseller list?

Tina Jordan: Actually, The Times really started tracking book sales in 1851, the first year of its publication. I have to say it was a little haphazard. They would just send reporters out to bookstores, especially at holiday time and they would literally print articles, what these correspondents found. The Book Review itself was founded in 1896 and it did start running a list at that point. It plucked it from a literary journal. Again, I don't think it was actually data driven. It was correspondence going out to bookstores in various cities. That's as good a job as they could do.

Brian Lehrer: Shoe leather, old fashioned journalism. Listeners, we might be able to take a call or two in this. Here's the question. Probably better to text us in this case, but here's the way you might contribute to this particular100 Years of 100 Things segment. Name a book that you read that everyone knew what you were talking about just by saying the title because it was so indicative of its era.

Name a book that maybe you read once upon a time or even your parents or grandparents, this a hundred-year frame, that was really indicative of its era, so everybody would have known what you were talking about if you were reading, I don't know, Love Story, Peyton Place, Waiting to Exhale. Pick one. 212-433-WNYC. Let's do this in texts as much as we can to keep it moving. 212-433-9692.

All right, Tina, let's start on the timeline. Starting with the 1920s, what books rose to the top of the bestseller lists then?

Brian Lehrer: The 1920s most successful novelist was Zane Grey, who wrote westerns. Most of his books sold more than 100,000 copies, which was a huge number then. The Book Review speculated at the time that the modern world was rushing in at such a feverish pace. These old fashioned novels were a throwback. We refer to him as, "a better Jack London."

He had a book called The Man of the Forest that topped the list in 1920 and then literally a book almost every year after that that also topped the list. I would say he was so popular and there were movies being made of these books. His success really overlapped with the growing popularity of Hollywood, so they were bidding for the film rights to his book. He's really the first author I think of whose success was bolstered by the movies.

Brian Lehrer: The Westerns were popular in early Hollywood and that circled back to the popularity of those books?

Tina Jordan: Yes. Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: I see you also singled out, for the 1920s, poetry and plays, right?

Tina Jordan: Right. It's interesting because we don't think of plays and poetry as making the bestseller list, but in fact they did. And much to my astonishment, I unearthed an article not long ago in The Times that the whole premise of the piece was poets can now make a living just by writing and selling poetry, which I think probably is not the case for very many poets now.

Brian Lehrer: I guess. One book published in the '20s that never made the bestseller list, I gather, is The Great Gatsby. Now it was its own thing in our 100 Years of 100 Things series. We did one of our segments on The Great Gatsby because somehow what it had to say about the 1920s is so relevant in the 2000s. When did it become a classic?

Tina Jordan: When Fitzgerald died in 1940, it had really fallen into obscurity. It had never sold, but then during World War II it was published in the Armed Services Edition paperback series and it became incredibly popular. That is what galvanized the new interest in it.

Brian Lehrer: Some of the suggestions or-- not really suggestions, but ones being identified by listeners coming in in texts as iconic for their decade, Catch-22 for the '60s, White Teeth by Zadie Smith for the 2000s, The Joy Luck Club in the 1990s, Bonfire of the Vanities for the 1980s. Those are all good ones. Moving up the timeline, there is a single book, I think, that stands out to you on the bestseller list for the 1930s, during the Depression, right?

Tina Jordan: There is, and that's Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, which was published in 1936, so during the Depression. It was published in June of that year and by July, The Times was already speculating it was the fastest selling book in US history. It had sold a million copies by Christmas time that year, which was an unheard of number. What's more, it was priced at $3, which was an astronomical amount for a book then.

I tried to do a little math, math is not my strong suit, but I think that's about $60 in today's money. The fact that this book was selling at this rate during the Depression was pretty remarkable.

Brian Lehrer: Moving on to the 1940s, one book that you flagged in the aftermath of World War II was Gentleman's Agreement by Laura Hobson from 1947, about a magazine writer who passes himself off as Jewish in order to write about antisemitism. Hasn't survived the test of time that much, I think, as much as some of these other titles who people go, "Oh, yes, that." Tell us about that one.

Tina Jordan: It was interesting. She was a popular novelist at the time and she told her editor, and I love this quote, "I've got an idea for a book that the magazines will never look at, the movies won't touch and the public won't buy, but I have to do it." She was really wrong on all counts. The book had a huge first serial deal. It was number one. It was made into a movie starring Gregory Peck that won Best Picture. It was such a smash hit that literally the publisher could not print copies fast enough. It is interesting that that has fallen into obscurity. I'm not sure why a book like that has vanished, to be honest with you.

Brian Lehrer: Let's see. Moving up the timeline, you've singled out a book for the 1950s that, in some sense, belies the image of that decade as one of post-war prosperity and conformity, one of our listeners named this one too, Lolita, for the 1950s.

Tina Jordan: Right. When Nabokov wrote it, he could not sell it. He could not sell it in America. He finally sold it to a small French publisher, Olympia, which basically was a smut peddler. It was a very quiet publication, nothing really happened, and then in The Sunday London Times that year, Graham Greene named it as one of the three best books of the year. That is what sparked demand, and then people started to read it, then people became outraged, then the lawsuits started. American publishers perked up and were very interested. When it was finally published in 1958, it was published by Putnam here. It sold just like Gone with the Wind had sold.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. That much.

Tina Jordan: That much.

Brian Lehrer: Were people reading it out of prurient interest or for its take on post-war America?

Tina Jordan: Ha-ha-ha. My guess is the former.

Brian Lehrer: Just to be real.

Tina Jordan: Right. [unintelligible 00:09:17]

Brian Lehrer: Let's see. Here are some coming in for the 1970s, a couple; Forever by Judy Blume and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins as emblematic of the 1970s. Our timeline moves to the 1960s next. If you're just joining us folks, my guest is Tina Jordan, deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review and co editor of The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History as we are in 100 Years of 100 Things, thing number 96, 100 years of bestsellers.

1960s, I saw you quoted a review by Nora Ephron of Jacqueline Susann's The Love Machine that called it a rhinestone in a trash can. Ha-ha. Was that fun, trashy read, always a presence on the bestseller list, or did it come into its own in the 1960s?

Tina Jordan: It came into its own in the 1960s and it really came into its own with Jacqueline Susann. Valley of the Dolls came first, I believe in 1966, and then there was The Love Machine and in 1969. She was married to a man who was a movie producer and press agent, and he applied the movies theory to her. He knew that he needed to make the book's creator into a star, and so they hired Hollywood press agents. She went on these huge tours, parties, plants and gossip columnists. She was really smart. Every city she went to, she would visit the Teamsters at dawn to thank them, as they unloaded copies of the book from their trucks. It was like the first huge orchestrated publicity campaign for a book.

Brian Lehrer: 1970s, I mentioned a couple. Well, even though The Great Gatsby escapes its time, you've singled out a book that could probably have only become a sensation in the 1970s, Jonathan Livingston's Seagull. For people who weren't there, what can we say about that book?

Tina Jordan: It's an illustrated fable about a seagull named Jonathan who's banished from his flock for his independent thinking. It had an astonishing path to publication. It couldn't find a publisher. Finally someone at Macmillan said, "Oh, I think I can make this work." She paid him $2,000, which was nothing. It is one of those books that was a grassroots word-of-mouth hit.

We have very few of those now. We do still have them. Bonnie Garmus's Lessons in Chemistry from a few years ago is a good example. This is a book that's sold just because people said to each other, "You have to read this."

Brian Lehrer: 1980s, some from listeners, White Noise by Don DeLillo, Bonfire of the Vanities mentioned before, 1980s. Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, 1980s. The one you single out is A Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, which came out in 1985. We talk about that book today with respect to the reproductive rights politics. Does that book sell more now than it did then? Do you know?

Tina Jordan: I don't know if it sells more, but it's never gone out of print, and it does continue to sell. The reason I singled it out was because it is rare that a book is both a critical and a popular hit, but it's even rarer for a book to become the cultural touchstone that that book has. We have to remember that Margaret Atwood, she was a literary celebrity in Canada at that point, but I think she really, was not well known here when that came out. She went on a book tour for that book that, by all accounts, everybody who saw her on that book tour was blown away.

Brian Lehrer: One author had the number one book in much of the 1990s, John Grisham. He's still going. What can we learn about the '90s from his legal thrillers of that decade? Real brief as we need to-

Tina Jordan: We need to move on, right.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, just because we're going to run out of time.

Tina Jordan: I think that readers really identified with the cases that these young, plucky lawyers took, they were going up against health insurance industry and the tobacco companies. The lawyers themselves, they were David and Goliath stories. They also made clear that, honestly, the law isn't always in the favor of ordinary people. Right. Like, so I think that he. Those books resonated with people for those reasons, and then, of course, there were the movies.

Brian Lehrer: We're up to the 2000s now. What jumps out at you from that decade? Give me one or two.

Tina Jordan: Well, it has to be The Da Vinci Code.

Brian Lehrer: Dan Brown.

Tina Jordan: Dan Brown, which I think was a bestseller for a number of reasons, but let me just say the Vatican's staunch opposition to it and their constant refrain of, "Christians should not read this book," probably helped it become a success.

Brian Lehrer: It's such a perennial. When a political group launches a big protest against something in the culture, a book, a play, a movie, they wind up only bringing more audience to it in many cases. I mentioned White Noise from the early 2000s, Zadie Smith, that a listener brought up. Another one from then, listener writes, Eat, Pray, Love, so big in the early 2000s. In the 2010s, am I right that we see young adult fiction like The Hunger Games and The Fault in our Stars surging then? Is that a new thing in that decade, that young adult fiction even has that tag or gets on the bestseller list?

Tina Jordan: I think there was a certain group of people, adults, who got very interested in YA fiction when the Harry Potter books came out and they continued to read it. The sales numbers for these books, for The Hunger Games, for The Fault in our Stars, they're so enormous that the audience for them isn't just teenagers. People in their 20s and 30s were buying and reading these books as well.

Brian Lehrer: Here we are halfway through the 2020s. What's happening now?

Tina Jordan: I think romantasy, the genre that blends the conventions of fantasy and romance, is dominating the bestseller lists, the books of Sarah Moss and Rebecca Yarros in particular. Much of the success of romantasy can be traced back to the segment of TikTok called BookTok, which has proven to be a really formidable factor in book sales.

Brian Lehrer: We have to leave it there. We did it, 100 years of bestsellers, 100 Years of 100 Things, thing number 96. Only four more to go. Tina Jordan, deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review and co editor of The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History. You were so great. You really gave us such substance so efficiently and quickly and wonderfully about books in each decade. Thank you so much for this.

Tina Jordan: Thank you for having me.

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