What's Everyone Reading? Popular Fiction and Nonfiction

Unusual Best-Sellers.

Histories of twelve hundred pages generally do not sell well, but William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), about Nazi Germany, proved an exception by selling more than half a million copies and remaining on the best-seller list through 1961. It was a good decade for nonfiction in general, though best-seller-list definitions of what constituted nonfiction in some cases seemed arbitrary, including Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" collections and Rod McKuen's books of poems, for example. Readers are always interested in sex, and Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (1962) found a voracious readership.

Best-Selling Literature.

Despite the concerns of critics, professors, and others that quality fiction was being smothered by a mass of popular fiction, it was also a good decade for literature: J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey(1961), Katherine Anne...

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