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.

1936-1937: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Author:
           Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) was born to a wealthy family in Atlanta, Georgia.  The only daughter of an attorney and a suffragist in the Deep South, Mitchell’s upbringing was an unusual one.  For instance, after an accident when Mitchell was three, her mother had her start wearing boy’s clothes and she took up the nickname “Jimmy.”  This lasted until she was fourteen. 

            She attended Washington Seminary in Atlanta, an exclusive girl’s school, from 1914 to 1918.  After graduating, she became engaged to army lieutenant Clifford Henry, who was killed in action later that year.  In January 1919, her mother died of the flu. 

            In 1922 she married Berrien Upshaw.  The marriage lasted only two years and was by no account a happy one. Upshaw ran out less than a year into the marriage, providing further impetus for Mitchell to pursue her own career, in this case, journalism.  She began writing for The Atlanta Journal at the end of 1922.  In 1924, she divorced Upshaw and married John Marsh.

            In 1926, while recovering from an injured ankle, Mitchell began writing Gone with the Wind.  The novel was published in 1936 and became one of the best selling novels in American history. 

            Mitchell was hit by a car in 1949 and died in the hospital five days later.

First Edition Cover

The Book:
           Gone with the Wind is known for being a long book.  At over 1,000 pages, I can’t argue with that.  Yet despite its length, Gone with the Wind managed to keep up a good pace throughout.  This was in no small part due to how surprisingly compelling the protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara, was.  While I’ve always heard Gone with the Wind described as a romance novel, I’m inclined to agree with those who claim it is a bildungsroman.*  Part of the reason the story is so compelling is the focus on Scarlett’s personal development and adaptation to (and fights against) the changing norms of the South during and after the Civil War. 

            Even today, this is a delicate subject, and Mitchell’s rendering of the South of that time is worthy of comment.  The novel is at times in love with the antebellum South, painting northern Georgia as a near utopia; at other times, it shows the South as being blinded by its own arrogance and dedication to tradition.  Scarlett is a product of both the good and bad: she had a privileged upbringing and was spoiled by it; she had embraced the period’s ideals of womanhood and became trapped by it; she had the fierce pride of her neighbors and was destroyed by it. 

            Scarlett is a complex figure.  Though she tries to escape the social and cultural bonds that society has pressed on her, she can’t help but be a product of that same society.  Published in the decade following the flapper-era and as men started to go back to work as a result of jobs created by the New Deal (while women were also employed, the majority of jobs for which they could apply were given to unmarried women and widows).

            Scarlett has a number of men in her life, most famously Rhett Butler, who flaunts his disdain for tradition and propriety.  It’s this very quality of his that causes Scarlett to both admire and hate him.  Their relationship is far from ideal for either of them and is marred by tragedy and conflict.  The realistic flaws in the characters are a large part of what makes this novel so compelling.  The focus on one of the defining periods of (then recent) American history certainly helped sales.

            Historical novels were also experiencing a peak in popularity (Edmonds’ Drums Along the Mohawk was in the top five bestsellers of the year in 1936 and 1937).  A trend that would  continue, including the bestseller of 1938, The Yearling, which takes place in the Florida backwoods in the 19^th century.  Whereas other bestselling historical novels of the time have been largely forgotten (e.g. Anthony Adverse), Gone with the Wind is still popular almost 80 years after publication.  The 1939 film version starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable is in no small part responsible.

A classic, Gone with the Wind is ranked 6^th on the American Film Institute’s top 100 films list, and was in the first group of films preserved by the National Film Registry. 

            But while the film version has helped the novel remain popular, the novel’s own strength is largely responsible as well.  It’s a long book, but if you have the time and patience, it’s certainly worth a read.

*For those non-English Majors: a bildungsroman is basically a coming-of-age story where the focus is on the protagonist’s personal growth.  In Gone with the Wind, there is no over-arching objective (e.g. defeat the bad guy, win the love interest’s heart) beyond Scarlett’s development as a person.  Some notable examples are Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye or Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Also Published in 1936 & 1937:

James M. Cain - Double Indemnity
John Dos Passos - The Big Money
William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom!
George Orwell - Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Isak Dinesen - Out of Africa
Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
Virginia Woolf - The Years