In 2018, Literary Hub managing editor Emily Temple analyzed nearly a century’s worth of Publisher’s Weekly best-seller lists to determine which books sold best each year. In addition to splitting nonfiction and fiction into separate lists, she omitted young adult fiction altogether—so don’t expect to see any Harry Potter.
It’s a fascinating cultural portrait of the country during a given decade. The nonfiction best-seller lists in the ’70s were a tug-of-war between sex and religion, where guides like The Sensuous Man and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask competed with Kenneth Taylor’s The Living Bible and Billy Graham’s Angels.
The ’80s were all about sci-fi movies and Stephen King. Novelizations of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Return of the Jedi ruled the fiction best-seller list in 1982 and 1983, respectively. King took the top spot in 1984 (The Talisman, co-written with Peter Straub), 1986 (It), and 1987 (The Tommyknockers). On the nonfiction side, people focused on health fads and business in equal measure, from Judy Mazel’s The Beverly Hills Diet to automobile titan Lee Iacocca’s autobiography.
No one author dominated the 1990s more than John Grisham, who had a different best-seller every year straight from 1994 to 2000 (and more sprinkled throughout the following decade). Self-help especially resonated with nonfiction readers of the 2000s, led by Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret.
Trends aside, best-seller lists often aren’t definitive or even totally objective. For example, as Temple pointed out, some of Publisher’s Weekly’s so-called “nonfiction” offerings really stretch the boundaries of that term—like the Bible.
“These lists are subject to all of the flaws, faults, and inaccuracies of any best-seller lists, but they’re what we’ve got,” Temple wrote.
For a more complete picture of what was captivating U.S. readers each year, Temple padded her breakdown with other best-sellers, along with famous books published that year that didn’t top sales charts. You can see the top seller in fiction and nonfiction for your birth year (assuming it falls between 1930 and 2017) below, and explore Temple’s more comprehensive lists for nonfiction here and fiction here.
[h/t Literary Hub]
The Best-Selling Books From the Year You Were Born
Source: Philippines Wonders
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