I admire anyone who stumbles over a treasure and devotes their time to excavating and sharing it with others. It took nearly a decade of dedication for Stephen Prothero to extract a book-length work from the personal archive of Eugene Exman, the editor of religion at Harper & Row between 1928 and 1965. The result, God the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time, is a journey through Exman’s psyche that presents a vivid account of mid-20th century America. It brilliantly exposes the symbiotic relationship between books and culture, and culture and books, at a time when the chatter of typewriter keys, and the ting of the line-end bell, meant the adults were working.
God the Bestseller is the story of a personal search for a life worth living during a turbulent time for religious publishing. In the midst of a civil war between fundamentalist and liberal Christianity, and during the rise of the civil rights movement, books were weapons. The progressive myth of America, shattered by foreign wars and Cold War rumors, was regrouping into a materialist vision in which the love of money challenged the love of God and the Word of God was finding new vocabularies. As Prothero shows, Exman toiled at this complex cultural cusp, cultivating the rich fruit that became a vast and diverse religion list. Faced with Exman’s fecundity, Prothero focuses on a selection of Exman’s finest: Harry Fosdick, Gerald Heard, Dorothy Day, Albert Schweitzer, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bill Wilson. This approach reveals new and unexpected connections across American cultural history developed by an editor who made no claim on fame—Exman (still) has no Wikipedia page.
Exman (1900-1975) wrote fragments of his own story, which went unpublished, in spite of being cajoled by his longtime helpmate, muse, (lover?), and confident Margueritte Bro. Perhaps even before 1950, she imagined a book titled “Letters from an Editor” that would reveal Exman’s soul in the process of growth. Nearly a decade later, Bro imagined a literary and spiritual biography that exposed the inside workings of the publishing process through one man’s work. God The Bestseller is an overdue consummation of these ideas.
Prothero has all the disadvantages and advantages of being an outsider, invited in to look over the treasures of Exman’s books and papers. Some were in boxes, some bagged as rubbish. Personal notes from famous authors fluttered from dustjackets as Prothero delved into his riches. Prothero faced organizational choices greater than my residual question as to how a liberal and a pacifist, a man who critiqued capitalism, engaged in psychic phenomena, and did not blush at his friends’ homosexuality, survived the McCarthy era? Was “religion” a sufficient cover for such “deviance”?
Exman’s life could be organized chronologically, but the concurrent work of an editor with multiple authors is not conducive to conveying the rounded stories of the books Exman published. As the biographer of an editor, Prothero deploys two literary devices. The first device he uses is to privilege a mystical experience of the sixteen-year-old Exman in Blanchester, Ohio. An account of this disembodied event is embodied by Prothero in a prologue, prior to the preface, where it symbolically haunts his account of Exman’s life. Without downplaying the significance of this epiphany, which turned an evangelical farm boy into an open-minded seeker, the risk Prothero faces is of presenting Exman’s life as lived looking backwards to “revisit,” “recapture,” “reproduce,” and “return to” “that charge of the holy surging like lightning through his bones.”
I found the evidence of this “mystical quest” patchy: a few mentions over the next sixty years; Exman’s willingness to both experiment with LSD (four days after his 58th birthday!) and be disillusioned with its mystical efficacy on his second encounter; and the time limit of a week Exman placed on his visit to a Hindu guru’s ashram, with side trips to Delhi and the Taj Mahal, which speak more of tourism than a mystical quest. The threat of setting up a nostalgic yearning for a totemic experience risks distracting from Exman’s achievement and the luxurious liberty, to push in whatever direction he chose, that Exman achieved at Harper & Row. When Exman stood down as religion editor, he wrote books about Harpers rather than pursue his mystical quest.
The second device is Prothero’s introduction of the idea of a “Book of Books” to convey the relationship between the editor and his network of authors. Prothero uses this motif to explicitly place Exman within the shadow of William James. “If you think of the books that Exman published at Harper & Row from the 1920s into the 1960s as one massive anthology of religious experiences, a Book of Books, it is hard not to see its similarities to James’s Varieties of Religious Experience”(72). While recognizing how James’ pluralism and focus on experience are reflected in Exman’s output of biographies and autobiographies, there is a risk here of downplaying the dynamic contingency of the publishing industry. James curated his “Varieties,” intentionally ordering them like a scientist. Exman, by contrast, had no plan. He had a job. And the evidence Prothero marshals demonstrates again and again Exman’s willingness to step into the not yet known, confident in his capacity to improvise and find the stories that would sell.
These matters of organization and emphasis do nothing to detract from the welcome light Prothero shines on the cultural history of religion in America. In all its most interesting junctures, there is Exman, in the background, providing the professional means and expertise for his authors to assault the best-seller lists and 20th-century consciousness. And, in a final publishing trick, HarperOne, the publisher of this volume, took Prothero’s provisional title, The Work of Eugene Exman (1900-1975), and transformed it into God the Bestseller—the sort of marketing magic that would have made Exman proud.
Richard Saville-Smith is an independent scholar.
Richard Saville-Smith
Date Of Review:
August 16, 2023
