History as good story

My parents — mostly, I suspect, Dad — were very interested in making their sons readers. I was early taken to the children's section of the library. And, just about as soon as I could take advantage they purchased several subscriptions. I remember receiving monthly an abridged version of a classic like Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or Dickens' Oliver Twist. My early interest in history was encouraged by the regular reception, again, every month, of a Landmark book, published by Random House. I just came across this account of that series:

Lawson was one of the Doolittle raiders

Once there was a history book series that was so successful, it lured an entire generation of young readers to the discipline, including many of today's professional historians. The publisher hired the absolute best authors of the day, which might account for a small but dedicated audience in the present. Yet Random House's Landmark Books Series, which ran from 1950 to 1970 and ultimately generated 180 volumes, is so little studied, there isn't even a Wikipedia article on it. This is unfortunate, for the books captured the spirit of the postwar consensus, with all its strengths and weaknesses. ....

Bennett Cerf, the magisterial publisher who helped found Random House, invented the Landmark series in 1948. While vacationing with his family on Cape Cod, he went to buy a book about the Pilgrims for his young son. The proprietor of the local bookstore told Cerf that there were no juvenile books in print on that topic. Cerf thereupon decided to fill the gap. ....

Not a single author was an academic. Cerf clearly preferred skilled wordsmiths, the more famous the better, who could engage a general audience. The early years of the series relied on such literati as war correspondent Quentin Reynolds, Pulitzer Prize winner MacKinlay Kantor, double Pulitzer Prize recipient Robert Penn Warren, and Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck. C.S. Forester, author of The African Queen and inventor of the Horatio Hornblower novels of adventure on the high seas, penned The Barbary Pirates for the series. Shirley Jackson, already famous for her short story "The Lottery," contributed The Witchcraft of Salem Village.

The books first sold for $1.50 (about $13.25 today)—not bad for a hardcover. Random House wisely packaged them with inviting dust jackets for the general reader, and in reinforced bindings for libraries (often with the dust jacket image embossed on the front cover). The paper was of the highest quality: even today the pages haven't yellowed. All the books came in just under 200 pages, with a legible Caslon font, reasonably wide margins, and even comprehensive indexes. They were illustrated, then the norm for children's books. ....

If the titles from the 1950s focused mostly on colonial history, the American West, pirates, and inventors, the 1960s highlighted the events of World War II. Most of these were written by actual war correspondents, such as Bruce Bliven, Richard Tregaskis, and John Toland. In some instances, these were adult best sellers simplified for younger readers. William Shirer published his mammoth The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1960. The next year, his Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler appeared in the Landmark series. ....

Cerf's hunch was correct: for young readers it was more important to tell a good story and to tell it in a simple but urbane way. In that regard, it would be hard to find prose more challenging and engaging to a juvenile than Shirer's closing words: "The remembrance of the grisly world nightmare [Hitler] provoked, of the millions of innocent beings he slaughtered, of the hurt he did to the human spirit, lingers on. The memory fades but slowly as the years pass and mankind resumes its ages-old effort to make the world a more decent place in which to live." ....

Thank you Bennett Cerf!

Generation Past | Perspectives on History | AHA