Bestseller Lists
Happened across a link that has bestseller lists from every decade of the previous century and it makes for fascinating reading. You can see the Zeitgeist change before your very eyes just by examining the bestsellers of the years of the '60s. It's fun to look for that elusive turning point, even if there be "outliers" on any given pre-'65 list. '64 was a year of Bellow, Le Carré, Uris on the fiction list and lots of Kennedy retrospectives on non-fiction. The '60s of our memory haven't begun yet.
In '65 we have a whiff of the self-help/self-psychology books that would become so popular during the next ten years (although some of it had roots that went back further) in Eric Berne's "Games People Play" which popularized transactional analysis, later made even more famous in the book "I'm Ok-You're Ok". That year we also have "A Gift of Prophecy" by Ruth Montgomery about the clairvoyant Jeane Dixon, who was a "devout Catholic and an astrologer". Was this a sign of a culture that had one foot in traditional Christianity and the other elsewhere? (More about Dixon here.)
If in '65 psychology and the mystic were discovered, 1966 we turn from the mind/spirit to the body. The top two fiction bestsellers are "Valley of the Dolls" by Jacqueline Susann and "The Adventurers" by Harold Robbins. In non-fiction, sex also found the list with number 2's "Human Sexual Response" by Masters & Johnston.
In 1967 religion becomes a target: "A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church" by Fr. James Kavanaugh hits number 5 on the non-fiction list. But replace this outdated church with what? Well, "Edgar Cayce--The Sleeping Prophet" by Jess Stearn hit number 8 that same year...
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