A study found (NYT) that “the emotional mood of literature reflects the mood of the economy over the previous 10 years.” Ben Richmond doesn’t buy it:
The actual researchers didn’t analyze any books specifically, they just filtered everything that Google scanned through their literary misery index, but something seems amiss when I test other examples. I pulled up the economic misery index for the second half of the 20th century and looked for spikes in misery. The George H.W. Bush years are pretty rough, but the highest years under his bespectacled watch are still lower than the least miserable years in the decade from 1974 through 1984, which includes peak misery, in 1980. So 1984 should have some real downers right? And it sort of does: There was a sequel to The Godfather by Mario Puzo, the Dr. Seuss that came out that year was a metaphor for war, Gore Vidal published a book about Lincoln, and we all know how that ended.
But to honest, it doesn’t seem that much darker any other bestsellers list. The top-selling Stephen King book wasn’t even a horror novel, it was the fantastical The Talisman, which might start with someone’s mother dying from cancer, but by Stephen King standards is still pretty upbeat. The nonfiction list had a book by John Madden and a book called Moses the Kitten, in addition to your standard CEO biographies (Leo Iacocca, in this case) and books about motherhood. Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic was in there too.
The Dish 