1940 Popular Books and Bestsellers

1940 Books & Bestsellers

1940 Fiction Top Ten Books

(according to Publisher’s Weekly)
1. How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn
2. Kitty Foyle by Christopher Morley
3. Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther
4. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
5. The Nazarene by Sholem Asch
6. Stars on the Sea by F. van Wyck Mason
7. Oliver Wiswell by Kenneth Roberts
8. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
9. Night in Bombay by Louis Bromfield
10. The Family by Nina Fedorova

1940 Non-Fiction Books

1. I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson
2. How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler
3. A Smattering of Ignorance by Oscar Levant
4. Country Squire in the White House by John T. Flynn
5. Land Below the Wind by Agnes Newton Keith
6. American White Paper by Joseph W. Alsop Jr and Robert Kintner
7. New England: Indian Summer by Van Wyck Brooks
8. As I Remember Him by Hans Zinsser
9. Days of Our Years by Pierre van Paassen
10. Bet It’s a Boy by Betty B. Blunt

1940 Notable Literature

To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Native Son by Richard Wright

1940 Book of the Month Club Selections

Verdun by Jules Romains
The Star-Gazer by Zsolt de Harsányi
The Trees by Conrad Richter
Native Son by Richard Wright
Mr. Skeffington by Elizabeth
Failure of a Mission by Sir Nevile Henderson
I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson
As I Remember Him by Hans Zinsser
The American Presidency by Harold Laski
Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther
New England: Indian Summer by Van Wyck Brooks
Trelawny by Margaret Armstrong
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Embezzled Heaven by Franz Werfel
There was no 1940 Nobel Prize in Literature
Most Popular Books of 1940, according to GoodReads
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