Backward Glance

The good, grey, elephantine New York Sunday Times celebrated a partial anniversary: the Book Review section was 50 years old.

Now middle-aged and fat with advertising, the Book Review paid tribute to the best-sellers which made it prosperous. In its listing of the two most popular books published in each of the last 50 years, oldsters might recognize some titles with twinges of nostalgia, and youngsters would still find a few on school reading lists. Movie versions had kept, others half alive. Sample titles (from the first four decades):

1896--Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Lady of Quality; 1899--Edward Noyes Westcott's David Harum, Charles Major's When Knighthood Was in Flower; 1901--Winston Churchill's* The Crisis; 1902--Owen Wister's The Virginian, Alice Hegan Rice's Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch; 1905--Mrs. Humphry Ward's The Marriage of William Ashe, 1908--Rex Beach's The Barrier; 1912--Gene Stratton Porter's The Harvester; 1914--Eleanor H. Porter's Polly anna. 1916--Booth Tarkington's Seventeen. Harold Bell Wright's When a Man's a Man; 1917--H. G. Wells's Mr. Britling Sees It Through; 1919--V. Blasco Ibanez's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Henry Adams' The Education of Henry Adams; 1921--Sinclair Lewis' Main Street; 1922--A. S. M. Hutchinson's If Winter Comes; 1923--Gertrude Ather-ton's Black Oxen; 1924--Edna Ferber's So Big.

1926--John Erskine's The Private Life of Helen of Troy; 1928--Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey; 1931--Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth; 1933--Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse; 1936--Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind.

* Not to be confused with Winston ("Winnie") Leonard Spencer Churchill, of Britain, no kin.

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