The Big Six

Even in the hurricane days of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind there had never been anything like it. In the first three months of 1946, six new novels had each run up a score of more than half a million copies on the presses or in print.

The new Big Six: Daphne du Maurier's The King's General: 1,000,000 copies.

Gladys Schmitt's David the King: 825,000 copies.

Erich Maria Remarque's Arch of Triumph: 750,000 copies.

Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: 600,000 copies.

Frank Yerby's The Foxes of Harrow: 600,000 copies.

Elizabeth Metzger Howard's Before the Sun Goes Down: 600,000 copies.

The Big Six of 1946 had at least one thing in common: each had been blessed by the Midas touch of one or more of the U.S. book clubs (TIME, March 18), for distribution to a list of several hundred thousand paying "members."

The novels themselves were a mighty mixed lot. Three (King's General, Foxes, Sun) were costume pieces, rich with sex, lacy or unlaced. David the King was an elaborated Bible story. Arch of Triumph was soft love scenes in refugee Paris, hard resistance talk. Brideshead Revisited was Oxonian, Catholic, elegant, epicene.

The authors, publishers, book-club operators were happy about it, even if the critics were not.

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