TheBestseller
Observatory

Best Sellers

Hardcover Fiction

Week of October 22, 1934

FictionNonfiction
WeekMonth
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1
SO RED THE ROSE
Stark Young
Cover of SO RED THE ROSE

SO RED THE ROSE

by Stark Young · Scribner

17 wks at #1 · 13 on list

Young's novel of war coming to the Natchez region of Mississippi has long been considered one of the best of Civil War novels. “If you would understand what was best in the Old South, its attitude toward life, you will find them here, glowing with that same vitality which was theirs in life.”-New York Times. Southern Classics Series.

5
NEW
LOST HORIZON
James Hilton
Cover of LOST HORIZON

LOST HORIZON

by James Hilton · Morrow

1 wks on list
6
1
THE CASINO MURDER CASE
S. S. Van Dine
Cover of THE CASINO MURDER CASE

THE CASINO MURDER CASE

by S. S. Van Dine · Scribner

3 wks on list

This early work by S. S. Van Dine was originally published in 1934 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'The Casino Murder Case' is one of Van Dine's novels of crime and mystery. S. S. Van Dine was born Willard Huntington Wright in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1888. He attended St. Vincent College, Pomona College and Harvard University, but failed to graduate, leaving to cultivate contacts he had made in the literary world. At the age of twenty-one, Wright began his professional writing career as literary editor of the Los Angeles Times. In 1926, Wright published his first S. S. Van Dine novel, The Benson Murder Case. Wright went on to write eleven more mysteries. The first few books about his upper-class amateur sleuth, Philo Vance, were so popular that Wright became wealthy for the first time in his life. His later books declined in popularity as the reading public's tastes in mystery fiction changed, but during the late twenties and early thirties his work was very successful.

7
LAMB IN HIS BOSOM
Caroline Miller
Cover of LAMB IN HIS BOSOM

LAMB IN HIS BOSOM

by Caroline Miller · Harper

23 wks 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.

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