Half-Century Scoreboard

The most popular and the "most influential" books of the past 50 years were collected and displayed by an enterprising Long Island library last week. To celebrate its soth anniversary, the Public Library of Port Washington chose the popular books from the best available sales figures; and asked a group of "informed people" to say what books "have most profoundly affected the thoughts and actions of mankind" since 1892. On the jury were Charles A. Beard, Henry Seidel Canby, John Dewey, Jerome Frank, Henry Hazlitt, John Kieran, Walter Lippmann, Somerset Maugham, Christopher Morley, William Lyon Phelps, Norman Thomas, Carl Van Doren. Their first ten choices, in order of recommendations received:

1) & 2 ) Hitler's Mein Kampf and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (tied).

3) William James's Varieties of Religious Experience.

4) A. T. Mahan's Influence of Sea Power upon History.

5) Einstein's Relativity; the Special and the General Theory.

6) Shaw's Man and Superman.

7) Spengler's The Decline of the West.

8) William Graham Sumner's Folkways.

9) & 10) Veblen's Theory of Business Enterprise and Theory of the Leisure Class.

Next came The Education of Henry Adams and John Dewey's Democracy and Education. Henry James's Golden Bowl edged out his brother's Principles of Psychology for 13th place, and Lenin's Imperialism; the State and Revolution nosed out his master Marx's Das Kapital. Also rans: Charles Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the U.S.; Bergson's Creative Evolution; Frazer's Golden Bough; W. H. Hudson's Far Away and Long Ago; William James's Moral Equivalent of War; Lewis' Babbitt; Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought; Tolstoy's What Is Art?

Henry Hazlitt was the only juryman to name Joyce's Ulysses. John Kieran, who appeared to miss the point, named as "books that I prize most" the works of Masefield, W. H. Hudson, Rostand.

The most popular books of the half-century, by estimated U.S. trade sales:

P:In a class by itself at 8,000,000 copies: C. M. Sheldon's In His Steps.*

P:Around 2,000,000: Gone With the Wind, Anthony Adverse and Gene Stratton Porter's Freckles.

P:Around 1,500,000: Mrs. Porter's Girl of the Limberlost and Laddie; John Fox Jr.'s Trail of the Lonesome Pine; Owen Wister's The Virginian; Harold Bell Wright's The Winning of Barbara Worth; Jack London's Call of the Wild; J. L. Hurlbut's Story of the Bible; Wells's Outline of History.

P:Around 1,000,000: Stevenson's Treasure Island; Du Maurier's Trilby; E. N. Westcott's David Harum; John Fox Jr.'s The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come; Florence Barclay's The Rosary; Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; Pollyanna; The Calling of Dan Matthews; E. M. Hull's The Sheik; America's Part in the World War, by R. J. Beamish and F. A. March, which was published in 1919.

*A religious novel of the '905.

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