1965: The Source by James Michener

The Author:

James Michener (1907-1997) was adopted by a Quaker from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  He attended Swarthmore college for English and psychology, graduating with honors in 1929.  After a couple years spent abroad, Michener returned to Pennsylvania to teach high school English.  In 1935, he married his first wife, Patti Koon, then earned his Masters and taught briefly at Harvard before becoming an editor for Macmillan Publishers.  

Michener served in the South Pacific during WWII.  His experiences there provided the basis for his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1948 and was adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the stage, under the title South Pacific.  In 1948, Michener divorced Koon and married Vange Nord.  Michener appeared in the top 10 annual bestsellers list twice in the 1950s, and fifteen times over the course of his life, taking the top spot four times.  In 1955, he divorced Nord and married Mari Sabusawa.  In 1977, Michener recieved the Presidential Medal of Freedom.   He died of kidney failure in 1997.

The Book:

Length: 909 pages
Subject/Genre: Israel/Historical Fiction

The Source starts with a crew of archaeologists arriving at a dig site in Israel.  This archaeological dig serves as the frame narrative for a story that spans about five thousand years, starting in the Stone Age and the move towards an agricultural society up through the creation of the modern nation of Israel.

Michener's writing reminds me a lot of Irving Stone's, but whereas Stone novelizes the biography of individuals, Michener writes the biography of regions.  He does have some of the same problems as Stone, most importantly the rather dry prose.  The Source is exhaustively researched, and at many times reads more like non-fiction or a history textbook than a novel.    

This is the second novel about Israel on my list (not counting the novels that take place at or around the time of the Jesus), the first being Uris's Exodus, which is also based on exhaustive research.  Israel is still a hot topic today.

The Source is one of only a handful of novels so far on my list to have not had a film adaptation.  In this case, it's not surprising.  The Source functions in many ways like a novel in stories, that is to say, a novel comprised of a number of connected short stories.  

The Source is pretty darn long, which seems to be typical of Michener's work.  I feel that part of this is due to the novel's function as a history book, where details and explanations that are not really necessary for the story, or even slow the story down, are included for a sense of historical completeness.  This can be interesting, if at times a bit annoying.  

Overall, if you are interested in religious history or historical fiction, The Source  is a good, if long, book for you.

Bestselling Novels of 1965:

1. The Source by James Michener
2. Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman
3. Herzog by Saul Bellow
4. The Looking Glass War by John le Carré
5. The Green Berets by Robin Moore
6. Those Who Love by Irving Stone
7. The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
8. Hotel by Arthur Hailey
9. The Ambassador by Morris West
10. Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk


Also Published in 1966:

Frank Herbert - Dune
Jerzy Kosinski - The Painted Bird

Sources:

Michener, James. The Source. New York: Random House, 1965. Print.

1959: Exodus by Leon Uris

The Author:

     Leon Uris (1924-2003) was born in Baltimore, Maryland.  His parents were Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe.  Uris never finished high school, opting to drop out and enlist in the Marine Corps during his senior year.  He served in combat in Guadalcanal.  After the war, Uris moved to San Francisco with his wife, also a former Marine.  While there, he worked for a local newspaper.  In 1953, his first novel, Battle Cry, was published to huge popular success.  From there he was given a job in the story department of Warner Brothers Studios.

      In 1955, he released his second novel, The Angry Hills and, in 1956, penned the screenplay for Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.  In 1958, he published Exodus, which became a runaway success, becoming the first of two annual bestsellers on this list and earning him a considerable fan following. In 1961, Uris released Mila 18 (fun fact: Catch-22 was originally title Catch-18, but publishers were worried it would be mistaken for Uris's novel).  Trinity was published in 1976.  Uris kept writing until his death in 2003.  He was married three times over the course of his life and had five children.  He died of renal failure.

The Book:

Length: 599 pages

Subject/Genre: Jewish history, Israel/Historical Fiction

    Exodus's story centers around the founding of the nation of Israel in 1948 and the relationship between and American nurse named Kitty Fremont and a Palestinian Jewish soldier and Mossad agent, Ari Ben Canaan.  Uris conducted years of research, including thousands of interviews in and around Israel, for this novel.  While the main through-line of the story is the Israel's independence from the British, large segments of the novel focus on Jewish history in Europe, including the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Auschwitz, and the Russian pogroms.
     
       Much of the novel reads like a political suspense/thriller, which is appropriate for a novel that is very political.  Uris has a clear bias when it comes to Zionism, which is apparent in the sense that he is showing one side of the question.  Regardless of your personal opinions on the subject, Uris does a good job presenting the argument of one side of a complex debate.

   While this debate is common in American political discourse today, it was in fact Uris's novel that brought it to the forefront of public attention when it was published in 1958.  Like most authors on this list, Uris already had at least one popular book published before he became a top bestseller, but the popularity of Exodus specifically is worth noting upon.  The end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties were some of the harshest years of the Cold War.  World politics is at the forefront of the bestsellers list as well, with 1958's bestseller, Doctor Zhivago, focusing on the origins of the Soviet Union, and 1960's bestseller, Advise and Consent, focusing on Senate politics and the Secretary of State.  Exodus made Israel a subject of political discussion for the U.S. public.
   
     The novel was adapted for the screen in 1960.  The nearly three and a half hour long film starred Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan and Eva Marie Saint as Kitty Fremont.

  If you're interested in WWII/holocaust stories, or twentieth century geopolitics, Exodus would probably suit your tastes.  The novel bounces back and forth between the main storyline and a number of historical episodes, which can be annoying, even if it's informative.  

Best Selling Novels of 1959:
1. Exodus by Leon Uris
2. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
3. Hawaii by James Michener
4. Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
5. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
6. The Ugly American by Eugene L. Burdick
7. Dear and Glorious Physician by Taylor Caldwell
8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
9. Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico
10. Poor No More by Robert Ruark

Also Published in 1959:
Robert Block - Psycho
William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
Günter Grass - The Tin Drum
Robert Heinlein - Starship Troopers
Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House
Philip Roth - Goodbye, Columbus
Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan


Sources:
Uris, Leon. Exodus. 1958. New York: Bantam Books, 1959. Print.