America as Paradise? Part of Making A Bestselling Novel?

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We’ve started a series of paid and free posts about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here.

In James Hall’s book, HIT LIT, he looks at twelve top-selling novels and tries to find similarities to their success.

One thing that he found in the twelve novels is the theme of “America as paradise.”

He writes, “America-as-paradise, an idea that so powerfully shapes our national identity, is one of the key motifs.”

Despite the decade the story was written in, he and his students, he wrote, kept discovering the motif of America as a lost Eden.

“American readers have a powerful hankering for stories grounded in the earth itself,” he writes. “Surely, part of this hunger is connected to one of our central national myths—America as the new Eden. A land of second chances, fresh beginnings in the virginal wilderness.”

Blame it on the Puritans, maybe, but Americans have traditionally been into making novels into bestsellers if they talk about this.

Often, the story has to do with getting back to this golden land that the hero or heroine has been cast out of or alienated from. Think Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind trying to get back to her vision of the South and Tara, her home. Think Michael Corleone in the Godfather cast out of the family and its golden promise.

That longing to go back to the way things were (a more innocent time, a more accepting family or culture, a place of safety) is a common aspect in American hit novels.

Alfred Kazin says way back in On Native Grounds (1956), a lot of American literature “rests upon a tradition of enmity to the established order, more significantly a profound alienation from it.”

You can see this happen in the books that have sold over 100 million novels as well

The English books: A Tale of Two Cities, the first Harry Potter, And Then There Were None, The Hobbit, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland all have the loss of innocence or place and then the desire to get back to it or at least some mourning of it.

These are English novels, though. The top-selling American novels are the Da Vinci Code and The Bridges of Madison County, both selling over 80 million copies. Both involve protagonists who lose their safe worlds and lean into something secret, something complicated, across large vistas and settings.

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Go to your greener pastures and escape the rodeo, but also be okay with coming back home to where it’s safe, too.

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