Word: fictioners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...FICTION...
...such canny old hands as A. J. Cronin and James Hilton, an occasional thoughtful and readable story-James Michener's The Bridges at Toko-ri, Herman Wouk's The Came Mutiny, now in its third year of best-sellerdom-but not one new work of topflight fiction. The novels worth cheering about-and there were several in 1953-had relatively scant commercial success...
...main trends of the year, non-fiction outsold fiction, children's books had a boom (notwithstanding their dully predictable tendency to preach good behavior in barnyard parables), and a lot of good reading continued to turn up more or less unheralded. Finally, for the second year in a row, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible sold more than 1,000,000 copies, to lead all other current books...
...novel also had the year's biggest sale among the paperbacks, a reported 1,500,000 at 75? . Another war novel, Leon Uris' Battle Cry, got in among the hard-cover leaders with a crude, realistic story about marines who had the virtue -refreshing in fiction-of knowing what they were fighting...
...richest, most exuberant novel of the year came from Greece, the work of 68-year-old Nikos Kazantzakis, a top candidate for 1952's Nobel Prize. His Zorba the Greek had a picaresque hero who, almost alone in the fiction of 1953, communicated the conviction that it is wonderful to be alive. By comparison, the chest-beating hero of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March was a neurotic wise guy-though Augie did better than Zorba in the bookstores...