"Blade Runner," "Blade Runner (a movie)," and "The Blade Runner"

I was in the library last week, when I came across a surprising title.  Blade Runner (a movie) by William S. Burroughs.  It turns out Blade Runner (a movie) has nothing to do with the movie Blade Runner, which is based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Elecrtic Sheep?  No, Blade Runner (a movie) is based on the novel The Bladerunner, which has no connection to Blade Runner or its source material.   Perhaps some background will help.  

In 1968, Philip K. Dick published one of his most famous novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Fig. 1.1: Electric Sheep

In the novel, Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter, must 'retire' six escaped androids.  The biggest difference between the androids and humans is the androids' complete lack of empathy.  In a plotline that didn't make it into the film, the humans on the largely depopulated Earth all need to care for some kind of pet, to prove to their neighbors that they have empathy.  However, due to nuclear war, most species are extinct, and those that remain are incredibly expensive, prompting many, including Deckard, to own an electric animal, one that behaves exactly like, and appears identical to, a real animal. (Which leads to the question: if taking care of the animals is a matter of conformity/self-preservation, does empathy even apply, which leads to further questions about the possibly self-serving nature of empathy).  Deckard has an electric sheep. The term "blade runner" does not appear anywhere in the novel.

In 1974, Alan E. Nourse published a dystopian novel titled The Bladerunner.  The backstory: Medical science has managed to prolong life and allow people to live with previously fatal conditions.  A rapidly aging population that needs medical care, along with an aging government, increase taxes on the proportionally smaller youth demographic, which is itself producing less, until the economy is on the verge of collapsing (A strangely prescient premise).  The solution to the problem ends up being free healthcare for life, on the condition that the recipient be sterilized.  This leads to an underground medicine industry, with suppliers, doctors, and bladerunners, the latter act as go-betweens for the doctors, suppliers, and patients.  Although it gets a little bogged down with medical specifics and some of the exposition can be clunky (especially in the second part of the novel), it's a relevant, thought-provoking sci-fi novel.  

Well, in 1979, William S. Burroughs was commissioned to write a film treatment for The Bladerunner.  Although no film was made, the treatment was published as Blade Runner (a movie).  I'd recommend reading the novel before the Burroughs treatment.  The treatment, as it goes on, gets more and more disjointed and surreal, and bizarre imagery starts taking more and more precedence over coherence.  There are considerable differences between the film treatment and the novel.  There are more "throbbing phalluses" than in the source material.  A lot more. 

In 1982, Blade Runner, the famous sci-fi film starring Harrison Ford, was released.  One problem the filmmakers encountered was picking a good title.  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was a) not catchy and b) nonsense, since there were no electric sheep in the film.  One of the screenwriters, Hampton Fancher, had a copy of Burroughs's treatment, and suggested the title Blade Runner for the film.  Ridley Scott bought the title rights for The Bladerunner and Blade Runner (a movie).       

So, if anyone ever decides to make a film adaptation of Alan E. Nourse's The Bladerunner, they're going to have to call it something else.  May I suggest Ubik?

10 More Short Books You Should Read

A couple weeks ago, the Huffington Post ran an article titled "These Amazing Classic Books Are So Short You Have No Excuse Not to Read Them."  It included the usual suspects, Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, Animal Farm, The Turn of the Screw.  There list is definitely worth checking out, but I thought I'd add a few of my own suggestions to the mix.  Here are ten great books under 200 pages:  


CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD by Gabriel García Márquez (120 pages):

García Márquez is one of the best known Latin American writers of our time.  His 1981 novel follows an unnamed narrator's attempt to reconstruct what happened in his small hometown decades earlier.  Everyone in the town knew that the Vicario brothers were planning to kill Santiago Nasar, except, seemingly Nasar himself.


THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE by Carson McCullers (71 pages):  

Carson McCullers is a writer in the Southern Gothic tradition, like Shirley Jackson and Flannery O'Conner.  The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (which usually comes with a few other stories), shows a haunting portrait of a small town, and the rise and ruin of Miss Amelia at the hands of the grotesque Cousin Lymon.

SULA by Toni Morrison (192 pages):

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's 1973 novel Sula focuses on a town and two women, and has one hell of an opening line: "Except for World War II, nothing ever interfered with the celebration of National Suicide Day."

THE CRYING OF LOT 49 by Thomas Pynchon (183 pages): 

Probably the only Pynchon book that will take you less than a month to read, but this slim 1966 volume has a lot of depth to it.  Oedipa Maas wades through a world populated with equally improbable names and even less probable explanations, as she stumbles through what is either a massive conspiracy, a colossal prank, or her own paranoia.  


FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury (179 pages):

"It was a pleasure to burn..." A great first line for one of the great dystopian novels in American fiction.  Guy Montag is a fireman: one of the chosen few who make sure that no book is left unburned.  A treatise on the evil of censorship and illiteracy, the danger of pacification through television, as well as a compelling story make this a fantastic read.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA by Ernest Hemingway (127 pages):

Published in 1952, this is the novel that restarted Hemingway's career.  It is a prime example of Hemingway's unparalleled style.

THE HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams (180 pages):

Published in 1979, Hitchhikers Guide is the first in the world's longest trilogy (the series has five books, whereas most trilogies tend to peter out around the third), this is the one of the great examples of absurdist humor and genre parody.

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder (138 pages):

Wilder's 1927 novel focuses on a disaster.  A bridge that has stood for a century collapses, and five people fall to their death.  Brother Juniper decides to try to understand the lives of those who died, and determine if it was all a meaningless accident or something more meaningful.

POST OFFICE by Charles Bukowski (149 Pages):

"Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought.  And then I did."  Love him or hate him (and I've seen plenty of both), Bukowski has had a significant impact on 'dirty realism' and can be pretty damn funny.  His 1971 debut novel is semi-autobiographical, the author surrogate Henry Chinaski has to deal with a soul-crushing position working in the post office.

A POLITICAL FABLE by Robert Coover (88 pages):

Originally written and published in 1968 under the more descriptive title, The Cat in the Hat Runs for President, A Political Fable is a bizarre book.  Allegorical and surreal, it will answer questions you never knew you wanted to ask like, "How many Republicans can be swallowed whole by a whale" and "Just how far do you have to go to drive the opposition quite literally insane."

1957: By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens

The Author:

         James Gould Cozzens (1903-1978) was born in Chicago but grew up in Staten Island.  He came from old money, a New England Governor on one side of the family and a colonial heritage on the other.  He attended Episcopalian schools.  He attended Harvard for two years and published Confusion, his first novel, in 1924.  In debt, he dropped out of Harvard and published his second novel in 1925, which, like his first, was not successful.  Cozzens went to Cuba to teach the children of Americans, but a year later he travelled through Europe as a private tutor.  In 1927, Cozzens married Sylvia Baumgarten, a literary agent who helped edit his future works.  His career took a turn for the better in the 1930s.  His short story, "A Farewell to Cuba," (1931) was nominated for an O. Henry Award.  His 1936 story, "Total Stranger" one first prize in that year's O. Henry Awards.  
          
         During World War Two, Cozzens served as a press liaison in for the Army Air Forces.  One of his main job duties was neutralizing stories that could potentially cause serious negative press for the military.  It was his experiences here that formed the basis for his Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Guard of Honor (1948). His first novel after Guard of Honor was 1957’s bestseller, By Love Possessed.  The success of the work was as much a curse as a blessing.  Cozzens writing style, which is admittedly Victorian, as well as the rather conservative morality of his novels, made him the epitome of the old guard of American fiction at a time when writers like John Updike and Philip Roth were becoming mainstream.  Cozzens, despite his fame, generally gave very few interviews, a habit he broke for the September 2, 1957 issue of Time (By Love Possessed was released August 26^th).  His interview led to further denunciation by his critics. 

            The next year, Cozzens and his wife moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts. Cozzens published his last novel, Morning, Noon and Night in 1968.  He lived out of the spotlight until his death from pneumonia in 1978.

The Book:

Length: 570 pages

Subject/Genre: Character Study/Psychological Realism

The title By Love Possessed made me assume the novel would be a trashy romance.  Instead, it is a look into the life of Arthur Winner Jr., a small town New England lawyer, a partner in the firm his deceased father founded with Noah Tuttle, a current partner and father of Winner Jr.’s first (and now deceased) wife.  The novel takes place over the course of a couple days, and is primarily focused on Winner’s coming to terms with revelations about the ethics (or lack thereof) of his partners and himself.  

            The story’s action, well, maybe action isn’t the right word.  It’s wrong to say that nothing happens in this novel, but most of what happens is consequent to action, lies in the effect it has on the Winner.  It is a heavily introspective novel.  This is not a bad thing, in and of itself, but it becomes complicated by Cozzens style.  In the first section, I stated that Cozzens has a Victorian style.  Cozzens is also technically skillful.  The sentences are complex and crafted wonderfully.  However, it seems out of place.  There’s a quote I find myself going back to frequently, from John Barth’s essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion.”  It goes: “In any case, to be technically out of date is likely to be a genuine defect: Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony or the Chartres Cathedral, if executed today, might be simply embarrassing.”  This of course leads to a lot of literary theory-type-questions, not the least of which being ‘does the time in which the novel was produced necessarily affect the interpretation of its prose?’  Cozzens writes like a (very talented) nineteenth century writer, or at least a pre-modernist, though he’s writing in the era of Pynchon and Gaddis, and Kerouac and Burroughs (William, not Edgar).  There’s no question that people like Pynchon wrote complicated sentences, rife with allusions (more on this in a moment), but the tone strikes back to the Romantics.  Describing a clock in dead father’s study, designed with a girl and cherub:

     “The little god was about to conquer all. Indeed, he did conquer all.  L’esprit est toujours – yes, Always! – la dupe du Coeur! So cuddlesome in form, he was the heart, the baby lord and master of the head. His victory was love – love’s bliss of thoughtlessness.  Love pushed aside the bitter findings of experience.  Love knew for a fact what was not a fact; with ease, love believed the unbelievable; love wished and made it so.  Moreover, here where love’s weakness seemed to be, love’s strength resided.  Itself all unreality, love was assailed by reality in vain.  You might as well wound the loud winds, kill the still-closing waters.” (10)

       This type of apostrophizing would be right at home in Dumas or Austen, and would there be a splendid passage, but it’s hard to reconcile something like this in the middle of a book written and taking place in the 1950s.  I mentioned the use of references earlier, and there are two in that above passage.  The first being the French phrase (in English, “The mind is always the dupe of the heart”) from François de la Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, published in 1655.  The last line of the passage is lifted from The Tempest (Act III, Scene 3). Shakespeare is subtly and frequently invoked, as are numerous other literary figures, the first chapter alone introducing Robert Browning and Thomas Moore, in addition to the above mentioned (and any I may have missed).  

            The story itself is strong, although the narration can be repetitive at times.  Winner has to deal with questions about his partners’ trustworthiness, his own infidelities, and managing a case of a man accused of rape.  But the real story is Winner’s loss of innocence and his struggle with his conscience, which may not sound like typical fare for a bestseller.  Then again, this was Cozzens first novel since his Pulitzer-winning Guard of Honor, and was itself nominated for a Pulitzer (and won the William Dean Howells Medal in 1960), so it’s not too difficult to see how it became a success, especially with the controversy mentioned in the author section of the review.  

            Like almost every book I’ve reviewed on the list so far, By Love Possessed was adapted for the screen.  The 1961 version focused more on Arthur’s infidelity, with Lana Turner as Marjorie Penrose.  

Winner was played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who today might be best known for playing the voice of Alfred Pennyworth in almost every animated version of Batman since the early ‘90s.

            All qualms about its timeliness aside, By Love Possessed is a good book.  At the same point, I can’t think of who it would be good for.  Usually I try to avoid simply saying read/don’t read this book, and focus more on what tastes would this book match and which would it not.  But due to this weird mismatch between the style and the content, I’m not sure.  If you don’t like books that delve into ethics and focus on introspection instead of action, you won’t like By Love Possessed.  If you do, and you like the style, it would certainly be worth a chance if you happen to run across it.  I’m sure there’s a demographic that this novel is perfectly suited for, but I can’t think of what that would be off the top of my head.

Bestsellers of 1957:

1. By Love Possessed - James Gould Cozzens

2. Peyton Place - Grace Metalious

3. Compulsion - Meyer Levin

4. Ralley Round the Flag, Boys! - Max Shulman

5. Blue Camellia - Frances Parkinson Keyes

6. Eloise in Paris - Kay Thompson

7. The Scapegoat - Daphne du Maurier

8. On the Beach - Nevil Shute

9. Below the Salt -Thomas B. Costain

10. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

Also Published in 1957:

John Cheever - The Wapshot Chronicle

Ian Fleming - From Russia, with Love

Jack Kerouac - On the Road

Bernard Malamud - The Assistant 

Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin

Sources: 

Bruccoli, Matthew J. James Gould Cozzens: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh, PA: 

         University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981. Print.

Burke, James Henry and Hackett, Alice Payne. 80 Years of Best Sellers: 1895-1975. New 

         York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1977. Print.

Cozzens, James Gould. By Love Possessed. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 

         1957. Print.

1956: Don't Go Near the Water by William Brinkley

The Author:

           William Brinkley (1917-1993) was born in Custer City, Oklahoma.  Brinkley graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1940 after which he worked for a couple years as a reporter for the Washington Post before becoming a commissioned officer in the US Navy, a position in which he dealt mostly with public relations.  After the war, Brinkley published his debut novel, Quicksand (1948) before going back to work at the Washington Post.  In 1951, Brinkley started working at Life Magazine, a position he retained until 1958.  In 1955 he published his only non-fiction work, a biography of a Slovakian nun titled The Deliverance of Sister Cecelia. 

            His best-selling work, Don’t Go Near the Water, was published in 1956.  He published six more novels between 1961 and his final novel, The Last Ship, in 1988.  In 1971, Brinkley moved to McAllen, Texas, where, in 1993, after a long bout of depression, he died from an overdose of barbiturates.

The Book:

Length: 373 Pages

Subject/Genre: Military/Humor

       Don't Go Near the Water focuses on a group of public relations officers stationed on the tropical Pacific island of Tulura during World War Two.  Structurally, the novel is episodic, each chapter dealing with a different problem and placing emphasis on different characters.  The 'episodes' range from the problems of an enlisted man dating a nurse (i.e., an officer), to blackmailing a self-absorbed war correspondent into building a schoolhouse for the island's children.  

         The novel's main character is Ensign Max Siegel, a burly Harvard grad who is the only one of the PR group to have learned to speak Tuluran.  The first episode of the novel deals with a very serious problem:  Edgar Rice Burroughs is coming to Tulura (NOTE: Burroughs actually volunteered to be, and served as, a war correspondent in WWII, despite being in his sixties at the time) and the PR people want to take some photos of Burroughs with the native Tulurans.  Unfortunately, the natives don't look native enough, so it's up to Siegel to convince them to dress like savages.  

     Reading Don't Go Near the Water is like watching an old sitcom that has aged remarkably well.  The humor is often predictable but generally sincere and the second to last chapter, focusing on everyone's reaction to the use of the nuclear bomb, is strangely touching, and perhaps presages Brinkley's post-nuclear-apocalyptic novel The Last Ship.  The humor is largely based on the absurdity of the PR division, the self-importance of its commanding officers, and the idiosyncrasies of the war correspondents.  From the novel:   

                                       

                 "[Siegel] foresaw the day when there would be one Public Relations officer 

                  for each combat man in the Navy, and the fleet commanded by the president 

                  of the Associated Press, with a six-star rank of Admiral-Admiral, who would 

                  decide on operations solely on the basis of their news value, with transmission 

                  ships occupied by nothing but correspondents, with no operation dispatches 

                  being permitted until the fleet was wiped out to provide a good news item." (p. 76)

In 1956, Don't Go Near the Water sold 165,000 copies, not including its book club sales.  The film rights were secured quickly, and a film adaptation starring Glenn Ford and Eva Gabor was released in 1957.

Don't Go Near the Water was reprinted in 2005, and TNT is apparently planning to release a made for TV version of Brinkley's The Last Ship next year.  

       I really like Don't Go Near the Water.  If you like humor, especially the type you'd find in good sitcoms, you should definitely give it a read.    

Bestsellers of 1956:

1. Don't Go Near the Water by William Brinkley

2. The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor

3. Peyton Place  by Grace Metalious

4. Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis

5. Eloise by Kay Thompson

6. Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor

7. A Certain Smile  by François Sagan

8. The Tribe That Lost Its Head by Nicholas Monsarrat

9. The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir 

10. Boon Island by Kenneth Roberts

Also published 1956:

James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room

Albert Camus - The Fall

Allen Ginsburg - Howl and Other Poems

Eugene O'Neill - Long Day's Journey into Night

Sources:

Brinkley, William. Don't Go Near the Water. New York: Random House, 1956. Print.

Burke, James Henry and Hackett, Alice Payne. 80 Years of Best Sellers: 1895-1975. New 

            York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1977. Print.

Interview with George Saunders

If you haven't got around to it yet, check out some work by George Saunders.  He's quickly become one of my favorite writers (In Persuasion Nation is my favorite collection of his so far).  Here's him doing a reading from his most recent collection:

1955: Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk

The Author:

Herman Wouk (1915 -    ) was born in New York, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.  He lived in the Bronx and later attended Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1934.  He worked in radio until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, at which point he joined the Navy.  He used his experience in the Navy when writing his Pulitzer Prize winning third novel, The Caine Mutiny (1951).  His first novel, Aurora Dawn (1947) was a book of the month club selection, but his second, City Boy (1948), failed financially.  He married Betty Sarah Brown in 1945, and they remained married until her death in 2011. 

Wouk has had a long, prestigious career.  Other notable works include The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978), both dealing with the Holocaust.  He currently lives in Palm Springs, California.  His most recent novel, The Lawgiver (2012) is an epistolary novel concerning the making of a Moses movie, told through text messages, emails, etc.  

The Book:

Length: 573 pages

Subject/Genre: Character Study/Bildungsroman

Marjorie Morningstar is a bildungsroman about an upper-middle-class Jewish girl with dreams of being an actor.  Marjorie Mogenstern starts off as an idealistic beautiful teenager in the 1930s. She comes into conflict with the social norms of her parents and her contemporaries.  She falls in love with an older man, Noel Airman, a composer also looking for success in the theater.  Their relationship is a rocky one.  

While I try to avoid spoiling endings, I'd be remiss if I didn't discuss the epilogue for Marjorie Morningstar.  So, if you don't want any spoilers, skip this paragraph:  The epilogue takes place fifteen years after the rest of the story.  Marjorie, now in her late thirties, is a typical suburban stay-at-home mom.  All trace of her ambitions are gone.  This has led to a lot of debate and dissent amongst Wouk's readers.  Either it is a moralistic story, condemning sexual exploration and individualism in women, or it is meant to capture what happened to women in a society that was unfair to them.  Whether it's a depiction of society the way it was, or an attempt to reinforce those norms is a contentious point.

Wouk's critical and commercial success with his previous novel, The Caine Mutiny, no doubt aided sales for Marjorie Morningstar, which become a cultural phenomenon in its own right.

TIME magazine, Sept. 1955

And, like most of the books on the #1 bestseller's list, a film version was produced.  The 1958 adaptation starred Gene Kelly and Natalie Wood.

Marjorie Morningstar has a complex protagonist, and deals with the serious issues of adolescence.  I feel the book may be a bit dated, not to the extent that it is unrelatable, but it is clearly a product of a 1950's sensibility.  If you're looking for a coming of age story and don't demand a Hollywood ending, Marjorie Morningstar is a good pick.

Also published in 1955:
William Gaddis - The Recognitions
Graham Greene - The Quiet American
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man Is Hard to Find
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Return of the KIng
Tennessee Williams - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Sources:
Wouk, Herman. Marjorie Morningstar. 1955. New York: Signet Books. 1957. Print.

1954: Not As a Stranger by Morton Thompson

The Author: 

Morton Thompson (?-1953) is hard to find information on.  The only print source of information I have on him doesn’t have a birth year.  The Wikipedia page and other online sources have his birth year down as circa 1907, but there’s no certainty that that’s accurate.  What I have found on Thompson is that his first work was a non-fiction humor collection titled Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player which was popular with soldiers in the Second World War.  In 1949, he published The Cry and the Covenant, a fictional biography of Ignaz Semmelweiss, the nineteenth century doctor who was forced out of the medical community with much hostility.  Semmelweiss had the crazy idea that doctors should wash their hands between the morgue and the delivery room. 

            Thompson committed suicide in 1953.  His last and most successful work, Not As A Stranger, was published in 1954.  That’s the sum of the information I’ve been able to verify about Morton Thompson.  If anyone has another source of information, please leave a comment.

The Book:

Length: 948 Pages

Subject/Genre: Medical drama/bildungsroman

  Not As a Stranger tells the life story of Lucas Marsh.  Born in a small town in the Midwest at the beginning of the twentieth century, Lucas is the son of a successful businessman and a devout mother.  Despite his parents' wishes, Lucas wants nothing more in life than to become a doctor.  His mother dies, and his father's business collapses around the time Lucas is going to medical school, leaving him broke as well.  Lucas marries an older nurse for her money and the story from then on is half drama, as Lucas becomes a great doctor but a bad person, and half exposé of the medical industry.  

   It seemed like this was two different books.  On one hand, a look at the inside of the medical industry, and on the other, a drama about the costs of success.  The former doesn't require over a hundred about the narrator's childhood, and the latter doesn't require the amount of technical information present in the novel.  Given the length of the book, it frequently felt like things were not really leading anywhere.  For example, we know from the beginning that Lucas is going to be a doctor.  On page four, the last line of the first chapter reads: "Lucas Marsh was born in the town of Milletta in the early 1900's, to Job Marsh, owner of a harness store, and Ouida Marsh, daughter of a druggist.  He was to be a doctor.  No more is known."   

    Of course, more is known.  944 pages more.  The story has some strong points, most notably the vibrant supporting characters.  Lucas's mother is a Freudian minefield.  The first time we're introduced to her, she's sitting at the kitchen table reading about phrenology (the pseudo-scientific belief that skull shape affects personality traits).  The seven year old Lucas comes in and Ouida measures his skull, noticing a bump that indicates "pronounced amativeness."  She tells Lucas that that means "playing with yourself."  She goes on:  "You must never play with yourself, Lucas.  Remember that, always.  And if you do, you must tell Mother.  Always."  She goes on a page later to tell Lucas that "Mother has such great dreams for you, darling. You're Mother's whole life, you know.  Never forget that.  Mother wants the little boy she suffered such agonies to bring into the world to be a great artist, a spiritual being the whole world will look up to."   

    The father is not as unsettling, but still a strange personality.  His name is Job, as I've mentioned, which also happens to be where the title is taken from.   The epigraph for the novel is "But as for me, I know that my redeemer liveth, and at the last he will stand upon the earth, and though worms shall devour my flesh, and my bones be as dust, yet Shall I see god, whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold him, and not as a stranger. Job, 19;25"  The naming isn't particularly subtle.  In fact, the mother's maiden name is "Bourgeois."  And of course, the name Lucas/Luke has biblical significance.  On the one hand, there's Lucas's father who is not spiritual at all, who sleeps around and is predominately interested in making money.  The mother is spiritual to the point where she almost kills Lucas as a baby because she refuses to listen to doctors.  And Lucas learns to strike a balance between the two.    

   

   Despite its length, Not As a Stranger is not only an accessible read but deals with the medical profession, which has been a consistently popular subject in literature (e.g. The Egyptian or Green Light).  It also had the benefit of controversy, having been denounced by Catholic World and the added attention of the author's untimely end.  The following year, a film version was produced:

The film starred Robert Mitchum as Lucas Marsh, alongside Olivia de Havilland and Frank Sinatra. This was the directorial debut of Stanley Kramer.

    As an exposé of the medical industry, the story is very dated, which I feel detracts from its strength today.  It's not a bad novel, but it's not great either.  It's too long for its subject, even if there are bright points scattered throughout.  Not As a Stranger appears to be out-of-print, but unless you have a burning passion for doctor stories, it's not something you need to go out of your way to look for.   

Also published in 1954:  

James Baldwin - Go Tell It to the Mountain

Pierre Boulle - The Bridge on the River Kwai

William Golding - Lord of the Flies

Richard Matheson - I Am Legend

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers

Sources:

Server, Lee. Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers. New York: Facts on File. 2002. Print.

Thompson, Morton. Not As a Stranger. New York: Scribner's. 1954. Print.