TheBestseller
Observatory

Best Sellers

Hardcover Fiction

Week of June 18, 1934

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1
LAMB IN HIS BOSOM
Caroline Miller
Cover of LAMB IN HIS BOSOM

LAMB IN HIS BOSOM

by Caroline Miller · Harper

8 wks at #1 · 5 on list

This 1934 Pulitzer Prize winner tells the story of a pair of young newlyweds in antebellum rural Georgia. In 1934, Caroline Miller's novel Lamb in His Bosom won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. It was the first novel by a Georgia author to win a Pulitzer, soon followed by Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind in 1937. In fact, Lamb was largely responsible for the discovery of Gone With the Wind; after reading Miller's novel, Macmillan editor Harold S. Latham sought other southern novels and authors, and found Margaret Mitchell. Caroline Miller was fascinated by the other Old South-not the romantic inhabitants of Gone With the Wind, but rather the poor people of the south Georgia backwoods, who never owned a slave or planned to fight a war. The story of Cean and Lonzo, a young couple who begin their married lives two decades before the Civil War, Lamb in His Bosom is a fascinating account of social customs and material realities among settlers of the Georgia frontier. At the same time, Lamb in His Bosom transcends regional history as Miller's quietly lyrical prose style pays poignant tribute to a woman's life lived close to nature-the nature outside her and the nature within.

4
NEW
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS
Thomas Mann

JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS

by Thomas Mann · Knopf

1 wks on list

V. 1. Joseph and his brothers.--v. 2. Young Joseph.--v. 3. Joseph in Egypt.--v. 4. Joseph the provider.

5
I, CLAUDIUS
Robert Graves
Cover of I, CLAUDIUS

I, CLAUDIUS

by Robert Graves · Smith & Haas

2 wks on list

Reconstructing grandeur, folly, & fantastic sensuality of Imperial Rome.

6
2
THE UNPOSSESSED
Tess Slesinger
Cover of THE UNPOSSESSED

THE UNPOSSESSED

by Tess Slesinger · Simon & Schuster

4 wks on list

Tess Slesinger’s 1934 novel, The Unpossessed details the ins and outs and ups and downs of left-wing New York intellectual life and features a cast of litterateurs, layabouts, lotharios, academic activists, and fur-clad patrons of protest and the arts. This cutting comedy about hard times, bad jobs, lousy marriages, little magazines, high principles, and the morning after bears comparison with the best work of Dawn Powell and Mary McCarthy.

7
1
SEVEN GOTHIC TALES
Isak Dinesen
Cover of SEVEN GOTHIC TALES

SEVEN GOTHIC TALES

by Isak Dinesen · Smith & Haas

8 wks on list

An anthology of seven suspenseful stories in nineteenth-century settings.

8
NEW
JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Cover of JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine · Little, Brown

Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper-realistic, boiling over with black humor Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic—boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at society’s idiocy and hypocrisy: Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence that hurtles through the improbable travels of the petit bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu: from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor. Ralph Manheim’s pitch-perfect translation captures Céline’s savage energy, and a dynamic afterword by William T. Vollmann presents a fresh, furiously alive take on this astonishing novel.

Historical bestseller data sourced from the New York Times Book Review, archived by Hawes Publications.