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Seventies Bestseller Lists
After two decades of cookbooks, historical novels and inspirational religious fiction topping the bestseller charts, literature in the seventies took a new turn. The independence and freedom themes of the sixties showed up in early seventies literature, with a 1970 fiction top ten bestseller, The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. Fowles tells a story about a women choosing to raise a child on her own in an artists world, as opposed to marrying into money and high society. By 1975, the independence and freedom themes evolved into the swinging singles scene, with Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner at number four on the fiction top ten list. Sex hit the top of the non-fiction charts in 1970, with authors taking advantage of the lifted censorship laws on literature in the sixties. Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask by David Rueben, M.D. took the number one spot, winning out over The New English Bible at number two, a book just as controversial. The New English Bible completely abandoned the conservative interpretation and traditional bible phrasing for contemporary wording and modern analogy.

The exposé became a popular bestseller tool, hitting its high point with the 1974 number two non-fiction best seller, All the Presidents Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two journalists that exposed Richard Nixon and Watergate. Interestingly enough, at number one was Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman, which marked the beginning of the conservative right’s counterattack on the sixties liberation and the seventies retreat from traditional values. The exposés throughout the seventies unveiled much of American society's secrets, including the treatment of Native Americans, the corporate world, and basebal,l to name a few. A revealing exposé in 1979 finally reached the most esteemed rooms of the country, with The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong.

Self-help and diet books replaced the cookbooks and home fix-it manuals that topped the sixties's charts, and starting in 1972 there were at least two self help books on every non-fiction top ten list through 1979, starting with I’m O.K., You’re O.K., by Thomas Harris and ending with How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years by Howard J. Ruff. Dr. Atkin’s Diet Revolution started the bestseller health craze in 1972, with multiple diet and exercise books throughout the decade, ending with The Complete Book of Running by James Fixx in 1978, and The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet in 1979.

As the picture books and inspirational religious fiction of the sixties disappeared, irreverence and satire became the norm. In Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut in 1973 maintained with humorous analogy an extensive satirical discussion of American society, revealing his views on such topics as marketing, government and the environment. Richard Adams in Watership Down commented on the environment and the land development industry, speaking through a society of rabbits. In 1972, Richard Bach made an avatar out of a bird in Jonathon Livingston Seagull, and by 1977 made a saviour out of a car mechanic in Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. Vonnegut ended the decade with Jailbird, a satire on the innocent unknown faces, the guilty known ones, and the born again Christians that spent time in prison because of Richard Nixon and Watergate.

The newest genre to start in the seventies was the horror genre, beginning in 1971 with The Exorcist by William P. Blatty, and again with the sensational Amityville Horror by Jay Anson in the 1977. In 1979, Stephen King first made the fiction top ten with The Dead Zone, a fitting end to seventies literature, and along with Vonnegut, Bach, the diet books and the self help manuals on the lists in 1979, gave a good indication of what American society would be reading in the future, and how much the seventies impacted and helped to change American culture.