by PBS
Salman Rushdie unabashedly expressed his scorn for Fifty Shades of Grey (2011): “I’ve never read anything so badly written that got published. It made Twilight look like War and Peace.” Subpar prose or not, E. L. James is obviously onto something with her works of erotic fiction, some of the bestselling books in history. Indeed, haters might hate, loudly and passionately. But every book ever published was launched into the world in the hope that someone, somewhere, would love it enough to read it and, these days, maybe leave a nice comment.
Some early reviews of The Great Gatsby weren’t so stellar. One critic called it “absurd,” and said its author needed a “good shaking.”
The first US edition of Moby-Dick, published in 1851.
Author Herman Melville at about age 66. Melville left his rich, New York City upbringing and shipped out to sea at age 19. His adventures would provide inspiration for much of his writing.
Melville published Moby-Dick (also known as The Whale) with Harper and Brothers. This is their original publishing agreement.
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MOBY-DICK
Herman Melville · 1851
Call me Ishmael.” Is there a more famous opening line in literature? This simple sentence begins a novel that’s anything but. Although Moby-Dick (1851) is usually shelved in the literature section, the book transcends classification. It’s simultaneously a psychological study, an exegesis of the Bible, a work of philosophy, an allegorical treatise, a cautionary tale about the dangers of revenge and ambition, an epic prose poem, and a textbook on 19th-century whaling.
Melancholic and misanthropic, Ishmael decides to give whaling a try. He meets the tattooed Queequeg, and together they sign on to the Pequod. Although they encounter other members of the crew, including the thoughtful, courageous Starbuck (yup, that’s where the coffee behemoth got its name), they don’t see or hear from the mysterious captain. When he finally appears, Ahab makes a riveting impression—stomping around on a fake leg made from the jaw of a sperm whale and swearing to find and kill Moby Dick, the huge white creature who maimed him.
The ship sails, lots of other whales are caught and butchered, and a cabin boy goes insane. Ahab hails every passing vessel for news of his mortal enemy. Terrible omens abound. After Queequeg gets sick, the ship’s carpenter makes him a coffin, which becomes the boat’s life preserver. Somewhere near the equator, about a year after leaving shore, Ahab espies Moby Dick, and a harrowing, days-long battle begins, dragging both man and beast down into the dark depths.
Herman Melville first shipped out to sea at age 19—a far cry from the opulent New York City life into which he was born in 1819. He was descended from what passed as American royalty at the time, with two Revolutionary War heroes on either side. After a brief return to land, at age 21 he joined a whaling voyage, traveling around South America and across the Pacific Ocean. He jumped ship in the South Seas and took up with a group of cannibals in the Marquesas Islands, an adventure that inspired his first book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846). This combination of novel and travelogue was by far his most popular work during his lifetime.
Moby-Dick, on the other hand, foundered. The novel received reviews ranging from the negative to the baffled, with critics attacking Ahab’s long speeches, the mixture of genres, and the extremely complex themes and use of symbols. His publisher reissued Melville’s books upon his death in 1891, leading to a popular and scholarly revival around the centennial of his birth. Nowadays, no one would argue about the book’s centrality in the literary canon; as English novelist D. H. Lawrence said, Moby-Dick is “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world.… It moves awe in the soul.”
An actual animal attack inspired the novel: in 1820, a sperm whale destroyed the whale ship Essex. (Nathan Philbrick wrote the history of the Essex in the National Book Award–winning In the Heart of the Sea [2000]; a decade later, he published a book of literary criticism/advocacy: Why Read Moby-Dick? [2011].) Melville’s Ahab is a monomaniac who sees his cetacean nemesis as the embodiment of evil and is quite possibly the most single-minded lunatic ever described on paper. While it might be interesting to consider the book in light of contemporary environmentalism, the text isn’t an anti-whaling screed by any account. By the time Moby-Dick was published, whaling was on the wane, a victim of its own success.
Melville continued writing after Moby-Dick but never again attained his earlier heights of fame. He embarked on an unsuccessful lecture tour, an attempt to earn some money for his growing family, and eventually took a job as a customs inspector in New York. He died in 1891.
In 2010, paleontologists discovered the fossil of a whale with teeth so ferocious, it probably hunted other whales; they named it Leviathan melvillei.
The Signet Classic edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, from 1950.
Author George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was influenced by Jack London, his literary hero.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was adapted for the big screen. This poster is for a 1956 movie.
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NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
George Orwell · 1949
We may be decades past the date at which George Orwell published his book and predicted society’s demise, yet we are no doubt living in a world he would recognize: one in which we are bombarded with slogans and truncated speech, surrounded by machines capable of recording our every move, plied with easy access to intoxicants and pornography. It’s impossible to deny the eerie foresight of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Eric Arthur Blair was born in 1903 in India but moved to England with his mother and sisters a year later. Although he earned scholarships to excellent boarding schools, he never felt as if he fit in, and he abandoned the prospect of college to become a police officer in Burma. He never quite fit in there, either, as he detested being asked to enforce policies and politics he didn’t believe in against a disadvantaged population. By 1927, beset by health problems that would continue to trouble him for the rest of his life, he set out in earnest to become a writer.
Influenced by his literary hero Jack London, Blair went undercover in the poorer parts of London and Paris. The pieces he wrote formed the core of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), his first full-length published work. He also lived with coal miners and served in the Loyalist militia during the Spanish Civil War. These experiences gave Blair a lifelong hatred of totalitarianism and cemented his determination to wield his words in the service of his antifascist politics. Using the pen name George Orwell, he wrote essays, poems, literary criticism, memoirs, short stories, and novels, including the ever-popular allegory Animal Farm (1945). In Nineteen Eighty-Four, published a year before he died, Orwell managed to calibrate his key themes with developed characters and a well-paced plot. Dystopian as it may be, the novel transcends its dire warnings and makes for a great read.
Winston Smith spends his days rewriting articles and altering photographs at the Ministry of Truth. Like everyone else in Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, he is assaulted with propaganda—including reminders that “war is peace” and “ignorance is strength”—and he has ready access to distracting vices. Curious about the “true past,” he finds an old blank diary in a junk store. Crammed into the one corner of his apartment that isn’t viewable by the telescreen, through which the enigmatic Big Brother and his government monitor and send messages to its citizens, Winston begins to write. He describes his attraction to Julia, a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League whom he suspects is an informant for the ruling party.
Even as Winston undertakes his first subversive act of literary exploration, he predicts his end: the Thought Police will uncover his thoughtcrime, and he will be severely punished. Still, the feel of pen on paper, and the freedom to express what he thinks, compel him to continue. In a powerful scene, Winston wonders to what extent an authoritarian regime might manipulate facts. Could citizens be convinced that two plus two equals five?
Big Brother, Thought Police, unperson, thoughtcrime, bellyfeel, N
ewspeak, doublethink, equations that don’t add up—the terms and themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four continue to offer us a meaningful way to discuss the rights and responsibilities of governments around the globe. When people talk about “outing lies” and “winning the war on truth,” they’re speaking a language and describing a political outlook Orwell would no doubt recognize.
A first edition printing of The Notebook, published in 1996.
Nicholas Sparks, photographed in Milan, Italy, in 2017, was inspired to write The Notebook after meeting his wife’s grandparents. The book would launch his writing career.
Photographed in 1996 during a location scouting trip for the film adaptation, the house that Sparks modeled Noah’s after was “one of the oldest and largest in New Bern,” North Carolina, the author says.
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THE NOTEBOOK
Nicholas Sparks · 1996
The Notebook (1996) is a romance novel with an especially romantic origin: twenty-eight-year-old Nicholas Sparks was inspired to write the novel after getting to know his wife’s grandparents, who were married for more than sixty years. From there, the story becomes even more improbable: a literary agent pulled the manuscript out of the slush pile. Despite having been an agent for only about six months, and despite never having sold a novel, she negotiated a $1 million advance for the first-time author. The Notebook then spent months on the bestseller list, was made into a beloved movie, and launched the career of one of the most popular romance novelists working today. Talk about a fairy tale.
As the novel begins, an older man reads to an older woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. He rustles the pages of a notebook and tells the story of a young man named Noah Calhoun, recently graduated from high school, as he falls in love with a young woman named Allison (Allie) Nelson, vacationing with her family in his tiny North Carolina town. At the end of the summer, she leaves New Bern to return to her life in the city, and her family forces her to break off the relationship. Noah writes her a letter a day for a year, none of which gets answered. Eventually he leaves to join the service. When World War II ends, he comes back to New Bern and makes over a farmhouse, modeled on Allie’s dream house, and his renovation project generates some newspaper coverage. Fourteen years after they last spoke, Allie sees the article and returns to Noah for two glorious days—after which she must decide whether to stay or go back to her fiancé, Lon Hammond Jr.
Even as The Notebook details the love affair between Noah and Allie, it enthralls as a mystery. Readers start to see that the elderly woman is Allie but don’t know whether the man reading to her is Noah or Lon. The elderly Allie can’t remember which man her younger self selected: the poor, dreamy Noah, who works with his hands, or Lon, a lawyer with a bright future and stable bank account. But she adores the tale being told, and falls under its spell with every recounting. The man who reads to Allie clearly loves her, and thus Sparks adds another dimension to his romance by contrasting the intense, fiery passion of young love with the richer, deeper bond that forms after decades of marriage.
Ryan Gosling starred as Noah and Rachel McAdams as Allie in the 2004 film adaptation, which was well regarded. More than 10 movies have been made from Sparks’s subsequent novels, collectively grossing close to $1 billion. Sparks wrote The Wedding (2003) as a kind of sequel to The Notebook, and he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of revisiting the characters in another novel. The success of the book enabled Sparks to devote himself full-time to writing. He was born in 1965, in Omaha, Nebraska, and started writing fiction while an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame. He wrote two other manuscripts before selling The Notebook, and has published almost a book a year since it came out.
Sparks attributes the long-lasting appeal of The Notebook to its simplicity and its wholesomeness. The language is direct and unvarnished, the love scenes sensual rather than graphic. As a romance novel, it offers readers both hope and wish fulfillment, but it also wants to encourage us to see true love everywhere. Behind every tender gesture—from teens embracing in a doorway to seniors holding one another as they walk along the sidewalk—lies a story worth hearing.
A 1970 first US edition printing of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was originally published in 1967.
Author Gabriel García Márquez, known by friends and family as Gabo, says the idea for One Hundred Years of Solitude came to him fully formed, as he and his family set out on vacation.
A telegram from Harper editor Cass Canfield to Gabo’s agent, Carmen Balcells, says emphatically that Harper wants to publish the first US translation of the novel.
Gabo’s office in his home in Mexico City.
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ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
A man stands before a firing squad. In the last seconds of his life, his mind flashes to the moment he first saw ice.
The very best novels always give readers clues about how they should be read, but perhaps none so clearly telegraphs its desire to capture the subjective experience of time as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). From the opening pages of this sprawling epic, in which Colonel Aureliano Buendía returns to a childhood afternoon as he prepares to die, readers can recognize that they too will move back, forth, and sideways through the long story of a big family in a tiny Latin American village.
José Arcadio Buendía and his wife, Úrsula Iguarán, settle near a river, after José dreams of founding a city made of mirrors. The novel proceeds to portray subsequent generations of their descendants, as they fall in love (sometimes with one another), make terrible mistakes, go mad, wrestle with what it means to be alone, but also learn to dance, feel joy, and delight in sensual pleasures. As if to further emphasize the inescapability of the past, characters often share first names. The storytelling intentionally echoes the Bible in scope, style, and thematic richness.
Intertwined with the fate of the Buendías is that of the fictional city Macondo. It grows from an isolated, somewhat Edenic settlement to a thriving city to the would-be capital of a “banana republic.” However, much as the family cannot avoid the repetitions of history, Macondo can’t escape the very real fate that befell much of Latin America as indigenous populations were wiped out or enslaved, as foreign imperialists arrived, and as civil war ensued.
Gabriel García Márquez is an exemplar of magical realism, which treats fanciful situations as if they were true. Examples of this literary style abound in One Hundred Years of Solitude: a girl grows so beautiful and stays so innocent that she ascends into heaven, along with some bedsheets she happened to be folding. At another point in the novel, it rains “for four years, eleven months, and two days.” And, at the very end, as the last Buendía dies, the area itself is decimated by a hurricane, and nothing remains.
One of 16 children, Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, a small town in Colombia, in 1927. He was raised mostly by his maternal grandparents. In later years, he would claim that hardly a day passed when he didn’t wake up having dreamed of being back in their big house, and for some two decades he envisioned writing a novel that would honor his family’s tales.
Affectionately known as Gabo, he’d published a few novels and worked as a reporter for many years before One Hundred Years of Solitude arrived, fully formed, in his imagination. García Márquez would later tell interviewers he was driving with his family to go on vacation when he felt compelled to turn the car around and return to his study to start writing. Eighteen months and 30,000 cigarettes later, the novel was finished.
Alas, Gabo and his wife were so poor by then that they could only afford to send half the manuscript to the publisher. The scrimping wouldn’t last for long. Upon the novel’s publication in English, the New York Times Book Review noted that the novel “should be required reading for the entire human race.” It proved so popular that García Márquez moved his family to Spain for a while to escape his fame. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 and left behind a significant body of work
in multiple genres when he died in 2014. In a career of extraordinary depth and range, One Hundred Years of Solitude stands out for its inventiveness and richness.
First edition printing of The Outlander, the first in the Outlander series, published in 1991.
Author Diana Gabaldon, photographed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where she discussed her bestselling series. She set out to write a novel in 1988 to fulfill a lifelong dream, and the result became the book that would begin her series.
Fans of Outlander—the books and the TV series—flock to Clava Cairns, a real-life ancient burial site that resembles the fictional Craigh na Dun site.
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OUTLANDER SERIES
Diana Gabaldon · 1991–present