Bestseller Database

As Max has it, this database of 337 bestsellers with extensive notes is bibliographic crack.

For instance:

Upon The Reivers’s June, 1962 release the novel experienced an interesting array of reception. The more “important” critics of the day “lambasted” Reivers as a mediocre piece of work while the “knuckleheads” such as New York Times writer Orville Prescott and Book-of-the-Month Club News writer Fadiman hailed it as an overwhelming popular success-to-be. Those who lavished it with praise likened the novel to Twain’s Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Those who criticized it’s shortcomings looked at The Reivers next to Faulkner’s previous, “more important” successes which many of them “hadn’t liked much anyway” (1). Many critics expressed relief that Faulkner had begun to “mellow” by introducing a new sense of humor and by simplifying his trademark complex sentence structure. Still others commented that The Reivers was not a far departure, stylistically, from Faulkner’s previous work. The following excerpts are interestingly diverse examples of what Faulkner’s Charlottesville written novel received from the literary media.

And this is quite fun:

Critics also complained of the immense length of the novel and the tedious didactic digressions. Granville Hicks of the New York Times Book Review complained, “Not in any literary sense a serious novel, it is an earnest one, belligerent, and unrelenting in its earnestness. It howls in the reader’s ear and beats him about the head in order to secure his attention, and then, when it has him subdued, harangues him for page upon page. It has only two moods, the melodramatic and the didactic, and in both it knows no bounds.”

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