1956

The Year my parents got married.

1. Don't Go Near the Water, William Brinkley 21 copies on LT

2. The Last Hurrah, Edwin O'Connor 90 copies

3. Peyton Place, Grace Metalious 302 copies

4. Auntie Mame, Patrick Dennis 316 cpoes

5. Eloise, Kay Thompson 344 copies

6. Andersonville, MacKinlay Kantor

7. A Certain Smile, Françoise Sagan

8. The Tribe That Lost Its Head, Nicholas Monsarrat 0 copies

9. The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir 271 copies

10. Boon Island, Kenneth Roberts 26 copies

Other than the ones made into movies, I've not heard of any of these.

Was Peyton Place made into a movie? I remember the TV series. There was such an outcry when it came out -our local library was asked to keep its copy under the desk. Read now, it's very tame & well written Grace Metalious was especially good at portraying her characters.

Eloise, the little girl who lived in the hotel, the Plaza? is still popular with children & adults. So is Eloise at Christmas.
Andersonville, MacKinley Kantor's realistic portrayal of the Civil War prison is still in print.
Auntie Mame is better known as "Mame" the musical.

Another 0/10 for me.

I can't remember the stars, but when the Peyton Place movie finally aired on TV I wasn't allowed to watch it.

Don't Go Near the Water was made into a movie starring Ernie Kovacs. It was his last movie.

Lana Turner was in the PP movie. Emily Toth wrote an interesting biography of Grace Metalious: Inside Peyton Place.

I looked up the 0 copies on LT

Andersonville has 175 copies
A Certain Smile has 60 copies
The Tribe That Lost Its Head has 15 copies.

I think Peyton Place was on the best-seller list more than one year, maybe others did so too. I remember as a kid a lot of "talk" about it, some of it of the "hush" type.

I'm pretty sure The Last Hurrah was made into a movie, maybe also Andersonville.

My mother really liked Auntie Mame which maybe was a Broadway show? One of her best friends would act out being "Auntie Mame."

Françoise Sagan was something of a child prodigy; she published her first novel when she was 18, I believe (A Certain Smile was her second).

Boston was Edwin O'Connor's turf. He only wrote five novels -- he died suddenly when he was 50. He was really good, and I've been meaning to reread The Edge of Sadness one of these days.

Andersonville is historical fiction about the Civil War prison of the same name. Won a Pulitzer.

I had a direct ancestor who died at Andersonville. When we lived in Atlanta we visited his grave at the cemetary there. The commandant at Andersonville was the first person executed for what would later be known as war crimes.

Just got this one looking forward toreading it Don't Go Near the Water byWilliam Brinkley and read The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor many years ago

>10 geneg: geneg

That is amazing family history, even if it is tragic. I don’t know why I am so fascinated by the Civil War, considering that all of my ancestors arrived later, around the turn of the century.

In addition to Andersonville by Mackinlay Kantor, and a newer nonfiction book on the same subject, I have The Soldier’s Story of his Captivity at Andersonville, Belle Isle, and other Rebel Prisons by Warren Lee Goss. It is quite fragile, and needs the attention of the bookbinder before I will be able to read it.

(Touchstones not loading.)

>7 vpfluke: Auntie Mame was adapted for Broadway in the late 1950's. Mame was played by Rosiland Russell, who then recreated her role in the film version. A musical version, titled simply Mame, ran on Broadway in the early 1960's with Angela Landsbury in the lead. This was then adapted for film, with Lucille Ball in the title role. There was a brief revival on Broadway in the early 1980's, again with Angela Landsbury.

This is one of my favorite stories in all its incarnations. "Life is a banquet and some poor suckers are starving to death."

**ETA - I just noticed that this is the list for my birth year. Maybe that explains the appeal. **

Auntie Mame opened on Broadway, Oct 31, 1956, and closed Jun 28, 1958, after 637 performance (this from theaterdb.com). I think my mother's friend thought of herself as Tallulah Bankhead before Auntie Mame came around. Bankhead's book, Tallulah : my autobiography came out in 1952.

I was always greatly amused by the scene where the kid is mixing cocktails. Not very PC for today.

Tallulah : my autobiography was # 6 on the 1952 Bestseller Non-Fiction list. Maybe, I should do this list for this group.

In any case, 1952 was the year my mother's friend became Tallulah, and it was later that she became Mame. (I might have seen this around 1960 after we moved back to her neck of the woods).

In the 50's, I had sampled the various cocktails of my folks, martinis, manhattans, gimlets, bloody mary's, Tom Collins, etc, but didn't particularly care for any of them, although manhattans were easier to drink than martinis. I never tried 'mixing' a drink.

US Non-Fiction

1. Arthritis and Common Sense, rev. ed., Dan Dale Alexander 6 copies on LT

2. Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, concise ed., David B. Guralnik 593 copies various editions

3. Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book, 2nd. ed. 150 copies

4. Etiquette, Frances Benton 8 copies (wrong touchstone)

5. Better Homes and Gardens Barbecue Book 26 copies

6. The Search for Bridey Murphy, Morey Bernstein 33 copies

7. Love or Perish, Smiley Blanton, M.D. 4 copies

8. Better Homes and Gardens Decorating Book 6 copies

9. How To Live 365 Days a Year, John A. Schindler 9 copies

10. The Nun's Story, Kathryn Hulme 109 copies

We certainly had #1, 2, 3, 6 in our household growing up. We had a couple of etiquette books, but I don't remember Frances Benton. We also had a Better Homes and Garden book, probably the cook book, maybe the casserole book. We had the New World dictionary, but it was slightly lower ranked than the Merriam Webster dictionary, and therefore in much better shape.

Besides the dictionary, the only one I've read here is The Nun's Story. Wasn't that a movie, also?

Amazon sells a dvd of the Nun's Story for $14.99. The 1959 film starred Audrey Hepburn and Peter Finch.

Zero for me. Of course I have heard of Peyton Place (funny how the title endured but not the author's name), and de Beauvoir. Kantor rings a bell, not sure why.

Andersonville with 227 owned at LT is the most popular of MacKinlay Kantor novels on LT, and is about the Civil War. I remember seeing it around, but at the age of 11-12, I wasn't about to read it.

I've read Andersonville twice, once around 1960 and then again about 4 years ago, when it just totally blew me away.

Simone de Beauvoir--is quite a famous writer. The Mandarin's one of the better known French works of the 20th century. She and Jean Paul Sartre were an item for a long time.

As for Edwin O'Connor's The last hurrah--it's a story about old time power politics on a local level--modeled on Boston's Mayor Curley's political machine. A lot of large cities Chicago, New York for example used to be run in similar manner.

And similarly, Edward Crump ran Memphis, TN and Tom Pendergast ran Kansas City, MO.

Mayor Crump don't like it: Machine Politics in Memphis by G Wayne Dowdy is a book about Crump, who lived 1874 to 1954.

I thought Boon Island quite good when I read it back in the late 60s (it's on the fiction list but, i believe, it is a fictionalized account of a real happening). It certainly wasn't my favorite Kenneth Roberts.

Without Tom Pendergast, we wouldn't have got Harry Truman.

Prendergast rates a chapter by the way in T. J. English's book on Irish gangsters in america--Paddywhacked.

I also remember the name peyton place.

I have read none of these

My book club read The Nun's Story last year. We understood it to be fiction, however. It certainly wasn't an autobiography, was it?

The Nun's Story is classified as fiction in Library of Congress (PZ), and as religion in Dewey Decimal (271), and there are a fair number of biography tags. It reminds me of Remy Rougeau's All We Know of Heaven

I read The Nun's Story and Andersonville both when I was in high school.

I remember Bonjour, Trieste Sagan's first.
I have both on the shelf.
I'll have to re-read them.
They were really wicked in the day.

I loved Auntie Mame - although did not care overly for the films - but was the only girl in my class not to manage to struggle through The Nun's Story. Is it fiction or non-fiction, or faction?