Nobel Prize for Literature: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Norwegian poet and playwright.

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Mary Augusta Ward, Lady Rose’s Daughter
2. Thomas Nelson Page, Gordon Keith
3. Frank Norris, The Pit Wheat speculation and the commodities market in Chicago.
4. Alice Hegan Rice, Lovey Mary Orphan girl Lovey Mary runs away to the Cabbage Patch (see #6 below).
5. Owen Wister, The Virginian
6. Alice Hegan Rice, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
7. James Lane Allen, The Mettle of the Pasture Set in Kentucky and written by a Kentucky author who also wrote The Choir Invisible.
8. George Horace Lorimer, Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
9. Thomas Dixon Jr., The One Woman Dixon was a Baptist preacher turned novelist, and this novel in particular was a sermon on the evils of socialism.
10. John Fox Jr., The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come Another book with a Kentucky setting, this book takes place during the Civil War. It was made into a movie in 1961.

Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant:
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory
Jack London, Call of the Wild
Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh I have this book on my Kindle, but I haven’t started it yet. Should I?
Henry James, The Ambassadors
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Erskine Childress, The Riddle of the Sands. I read this book on my Kindle not long ago, and I found it quite confusing. It does indicate the deep mistrust and rivalry that existed in the early twentieth century between the British and the Germans, both trying to build their empires at the expense of the other.

I’m surprised, not at how many of the books I haven’t read, but at how many of the best-selling authors I’ve never even heard of. I don’t know the details of how the list was compiled early in the twentieth century, but it was published in Publishers Weekly after 1912. Before that, it is unclear to me where the lists came from. And, of course, these are the best-sellers in the United States. Who knows what they were reading in other English-speaking countries?