Growth.

As a natural consequence of increased interest in religion during the 1940s, along with growing prosperity, sales of books dealing with religious matters prospered during the decade. Religious best-sellers ranged from popular self-help books and humorous reflections on religious life to novels with religious characters or situations to studies by or about well-known religious figures.

Bible Characters.

In 1940 Alan Watts published The Meaning of Happiness, which dealt not with a future reward for the good but with a present reality for those living in harmony with nature. Two best-selling novels appeared in 1942: The Robe, by Lloyd C. Douglas, and Franz Werfel's The Song of Bernadette. Also that year, the pastor for forty-four years of New York's Madison Avenue Methodist Church, Ralph W. Sockman, published The Highway of God, his Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching from the...