Free Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers by James W. Hall

inevitably goes down), there is a similar relationship between the creation of inner lives versus the creation of outer lives. As an author devotes more narrative energy to placing a character in historical context with attention to such matters as customs, behaviors, dress, and the artifacts of the age, there is simply less time left to devote to the specific density of the interior self.
    Wide-angled scope has been a feature of many of the most popular and some of the most grudgingly respected novels of all time. Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, James Jones, John Steinbeck, James Michener, and any number of American novelists adopted a panoramic view and set their characters against backdrops of enormous scale and consequence.
VITAL, EARTHY, AND COARSE
    A small story told against a sweeping backdrop—that’s the pattern repeating again and again in the most successful bestsellers.
    Early on in
Gone with the Wind
Scarlett O’Hara gazes at her father, Gerald, and tries to explain why she finds him so comforting: “There was something vital and earthy and coarse about him that appealed to her. Being the least analytic of people, she did not realize that this was because she possessed in some degrees these same qualities.…”
    Scarlett’s lack of introspection is a common feature among the protagonists of these novels. What’s true for Scarlett is also true for Allison MacKenzie and Jack Ryan and Mitch McDeere and Professor Robert Langdon. These characters are not self-absorbed or contemplative. Instead, they are shown primarily from external observations. We see their social interactions, their behavior, their dress, what they say and what they do in public and in private, but rarely do we go wading into the stream of their consciousness.
    Readers are carried away by big stories, stories of import set on a large stage, ones that also feature a wide assortment of social classes. For scope applies not just to a wide-angle treatment of subject matter, but to demographics as well.
    From the very beginning, novels have been the most democratic literary form, written in a raw, simple prose that gives free and easy access to all comers. It required little education beyond simple literacy to read the first English novels, and it requires little more today to consume a bestselling work offiction. In fact, the democratic spirit that defined the first English novels is still the defining characteristic of the American bestseller.
    The novel was born in the eighteenth century as the industrial age was making it easier for men and women at every class level to lift themselves up in rank. From the outset, those early English novelists considered it their primary duty to inform their readers about how this transformation might be achieved, using the most accessible language and style available to them and creating characters who originated from the vital, earthy, and coarser classes.
    Today, the most commercially successful American novels continue to appeal to the same demographic and to focus on the same issues those first novels did two hundred years ago: social mobility; racial, gender, and class fairness; the struggles and triumphs of the poor set alongside similar conflicts of the powerful. In other words, they are stories about characters pitted against large forces, not characters in conflict with themselves.
    Scarlett spends most of the novel struggling to return to the safe, predictable haven of the prewar Tara, where once she could bat her eyelashes and men would fall at her feet. Though her nostalgic wish to return to a prewar world is as hopeless as her fantasy of marrying Ashley Wilkes, that harsh fact never seems to dim her ambition.
    The fact that Scarlett doesn’t grasp the magnitude of the historical moment is part of her silly charm. She’s simply annoyed at the inconvenience of the war, a little grumpy at all the nonsense she’s required to do to survive, and she winds up whining more than whooping in protest. In