What People Read During the Depression

 

Today on NPR's Fresh Air, commentator Maureen Corrigan took a look at old issues of Publishers Weekly to see what people were reading and what publishing trends were like in the 1930s.  She learned that people were reading more books during the depression and looked to the old issues to see what kind of books were popular.  Some of her findings:

• Virginia Wolff's 1933 novel about Elizabeth Barret Browning's dog, Flush, was "certain to be Ms. Wolff's most popular book." 

• Women, then as now, were turning to chick lit, with the crucial difference being that many of the 1930s plots featured plucky young women whose family fortunes had taken a nose dive.
  

• There were also a plethora of hard-luck male extreme adventure tales published in the early 1930s, like Mutiny on the Bounty; Kenneth Roberts' Revolutionary War potboiler, Rabble in Arms; and one of the biggest best-sellers of 1933, Anthony Adverse, which weighed in at over 1,000 pages.  The allure of these novels seems pretty clear: Men who were struggling during the Great Depression could take comfort in reading about the exploits of stranded sailors, ragtag Colonial soldiers, and a disposed nobleman who has to fight his way from Cuba to Africa and to Europe and America to claim his rightful inheritance.

It was a great segment and well worth a listen.  it also begs the question---have your reading habits changed at all during the current economic crisis? 

Comments

[Vivian]

Reading books give you comfort, when you read novels about other people who made it a great success in life, inspite of challenges or depression they went through during those phase. Just as reading books, there are many other alternatives like occupying yourself in one of your favorite games, listening to music and so on, which give you comfort during those depression period.