Best Sellers

Edward Weeks of The Atlantic Monthly fortnight ago finished compiling for the Institute of Arts & Sciences a list of the books U. S. readers have liked best in the last 60 years. Easy winner, with no second, is Rev. Charles Monroe Sheldon's In His Steps, a Utopian fantasy of what the world might be like if people lived literally according to Christ's teachings (TIME, Oct. 9). Published in 1899, it has sold 8,000,000* copies, four times as many as its nearest competitor. Because of a flaw in the copyright, Author Sheldon received no royalties from his book. Compiler Weeks lists 65 titles. The first 19, after In His Steps:

Freckles (1904) Gene Stratton Porter 2,000,000

Ben Hur (1880) Lew Wallace 1,950,000

Girl of the Limberlost (1909) Gene Stratton Porter 1,700,000

The Harvester (1911) Gene Stratton Porter 1,600,000

Tom Sawyer (1875) Mark Twain 1,500,000

The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911) Harold Bell Wright 1,500,000

Laddie (1913) Gene Stratton Porter 1,500,000

The Virginian (1902) Owen Wister 1,454,000

The Call of the Wild (1917) Jack London 1,412,000

Story of the Bible (1904) Jesse Lyman Hurlbut 1,321,000

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1909) John Fox 1,255,000

David Harum (1900) Edward Noyes Westcott 1,200,000

The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) John Fox 1,100,000

Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1881) Margaret Sidney 1,090,000

Huckleberry Finn (1884) Mark Twain 1,000,000

Pollyanna (1913) Eleanor Steward 1,000,000

Black Beauty (1877) Anna Sewell 1,000,000*

Treasure Island (1894) Robert Louis Stevenson 1,000,000*

Trilby (1894) George Du Maurier 1,000,000*

U. S. readers are patriotic; of the 49 authors listed, only 10 are foreign. In the last ten years they have begun to take an interest in history and philosophy; H. G. Wells's Outline of History (1926) has sold 684,000 copies and William J. Durant's The Story of Philosophy (1927), 545,000. Col. Charles A. Lindbergh's We (1927) ran up a sale of 594,000. Latest book listed is Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929; 564,300). Only Nobel-Prizewinners: Henryk Sienkewicz, with Quo Vadis (1896; 504,600); Sinclair Lewis, with Main Street (1920; 546,300).

*Estimated.

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