Party like it’s 1973

Recently I was having a conversation with my brother about the current dark times — an understatement, to be sure. And somehow, the year 1973 kept popping up over and over. The mood of the country then was just as precarious, what with gas shortages, Watergate, Black September and the Yom Kippur War. The sixties were finally ending and the US was only getting itself out of Vietnam because there was no other choice to be had. Roe v. Wade was heard in the Supreme Court and abortion became legal. And even though Nixon would hang on until the next year, he was pretty much roadkill by year’s end.

But it also got me to thinking, if times were so dark then, what of culture? What was popular then, and did those books endure? After the jump, I talk a bit about the bestsellers of the time and what they might mean — if at all — for today’s times.

The top selling books of 1973 were as follows:

  1. Jonathan Livingston Seagull
    Richard Bach
  2. Once Is Not Enough
    Jacqueline Susann
  3. Breakfast of Champions
    Kurt Vonnegut
  4. The Odessa File
    Frederick Forsyth
  5. Burr
    Gore Vidal
  6. The Hollow Hills
    Mary Stewart
  7. Evening in Byzantium
    Irwin Shaw
  8. The Matlock Paper
    Robert Ludlum
  9. The Billion Dollar Sure Thing
    Paul E. Erdman
  10. The Honorary Consul
    Graham Greene

Several things strike me about this list. First is the continued success of Seagull, which was published back in 1970 but continued to sell amazingly well over 2 years later. Sounds familiar? I guess you could say it was THE DA VINCI CODE of its time…and let’s be honest: who’s reading Seagull 30-plus years later? (And god help them, why would they? It’s a phenomenally stupid book.)

Most everyone knows Susann for THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, but because of the popularity of that book (as well as the movie) this carried over to ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH, which was understatedly viewed as “not her best novel.” It would also be her last, as she would die of breast cancer the next year, but without Susann, there would be no Sex & Shopping, Glitz & Glamour, and everything produced as a backlash — even chick lit.

Several top bestsellers surprise me for some reason. I guess I didn’t figure on BREAKFAST selling as well as it must have, and Graham Greene’s presence outright shocked me. He’s seen as a great and a classic, but a bestseller? Who knew? And Paul Erdman’s presence is, in a weird way, a classic example of platform at its most perverse. Here was a guy who went to jail in Switzerland because of a bank scandal, and to pass the time, wrote a novel — which became BILLION DOLLAR and led to several other financial thrillers (like THE CRASH of ’79 and the “more disappointing” PANIC OF ’89.) In the years since he’s become more reknowned for his actual expertise, giving speeches on the current economy and potential oil crises.

Overall, I think, what books sold then and now aren’t markedly different — we have big thrillers, many that aren’t the best representation of a particular writer but whose fans will buy them anyway, bad self-help books, hyped first novels and unjustly neglected writers (Mary Stewart is in desperate need of a revival, frankly.) But if there’s a real common theme, it’s that these books are escapist — just like most of the current bestsellers now.