The Good, the True, the Beautiful:
Those are the things that pay!
—Lewis Carroll
Most authors can contemplate the prospect of making a lot of money with breathtaking equanimity. George Santayana, for instance, had no difficulty in grasping the news that The Last Puritan had been picked as a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. “Of course it is gratifying to have this sudden boost,” he wrote to a friend in 1935, “but someone must have it, apparently, every month, and really it’s not extravagant to think that The Last Puritan, which is a major work and original in some respects, should have been chosen to be one of the twelve in one year.”
But what was to Santayana cause for detached, perhaps even smug, self-congratulation provoked in John P. Marquand an oddly splenetic outburst. When his 1943 novel So Little Time was chosen as a Book of the Month, Marquand wrote to his son John, Jr.:
This, as you may know, is one of the things which we boys in our profession strive for, and I am told that I am peculiarly honored since I am one of the few novelists who have had two novels selected by this august money-making organization, and nearly the only one who has had two in succession. Aside from this I am not deeply moved. I think the Book-of-the-Month Club is a racket that is spoiling the general sale of books by concentrating on the few that it
