From Novel to Film

John Huston asked Bradbury to write the screenplay for Moby Dick. Gregory Peck starred as Captain Ahab in the 1956 film. Despite the novel winning the Pulitzer Prize, the studios were not initially interested in To Kill A Mockingbird. Gregory Peck also starred in film(1962) and it won three Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor. Grapes of Wrath (1940) garnered two academy awards for Best Director and Best Supporting Actress (Jane Darwell).

MGM offered $50,000 to make The Good Earth into a movie (1937). At the time this was the largest sum Hollywood had ever paid for the rights to a book. Twentieth Century-Fox paid $70,000 for the rights to The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Columbia Pictures bought the rights to In Cold Blood (1965) for $400,000.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was adapted for film multiple times, as were many of the Birss books. A musical version of Huckleberry Finn was released in 1974.

In 2005 Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions produced Their Eyes Were Watching God as a television movie. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was also made into television movie (1974) and won nine Emmy Awards, including Best Writing in Drama-Adaption and Best Lead Actress in Drama (Cicely Tyson).

Facts & Figures

Only 3,715 copies of Moby Dick sold during Melville's life. When first published in serial form (1851-1852), Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 1 million copies in its first week. When the book came out in 1852 over 10,000 copies of the two-volume work sold in the first week and 300,000 copies in the first year. It has been in print continuously since then.

Several other titles were published in as newspaper or magazine serials before being printed in book form, including In Cold Blood and The Red Badge of Courage. Although Crane’s original manuscript totaled 55,000 words, only 18,000 words were permitted for the serial version, severely limiting the story's intended breadth and scope. Even when printed in book form the following year, 5,000 words were excised, resulting in the removal of the entire twelfth chapter and parts of other chapters.

Unable to find a publisher, Whitman printed about 795 copies of Leaves of Grass at his own expense. No publisher’s name or author’s name appeared on that 1855 first edition.

Rockwell Kent produced illustrated editions of Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass.

Thoreau and Whitman met in Brooklyn in 1856 and exchanged copies of their books.

The Good Earth appeared on the first ever New York Times Bestseller list (1931), and the following year the novel won the Pulitzer Prize. The Grapes of Wrath and To Kill a Mockingbird also won the Pulitzer in 1940 and 1961, respectively.

Kerouac's original manuscript of On the Road (1951), which was rejected, was typed on a 120-foot-long scroll of teletype paper and contained virtually no punctuation.

The original version of Night was over 800 pages and written in Yiddish as Un die Welt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent ). Wiesel wrote a much shorter version in French, published in 1958 and two years later it was translated into English. Despite, its eventual popularity, Night sold less than 2,000 copies in its first 18 months in the United States.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first banned in Concord, Massachusetts in 1885. Of all the Birss books, only Walden and The Street have never been banned.

In an 1882 letter, Twain wrote that Moby-Dick was "the greatest of American novels, and the greatest piece of creative work in American fiction" and later in an 1890 essay, he described Melville as a "man of genius" whose work had a lasting impact on the country's literary tradition.

Their Eyes Were Watching (1937) had little success during Hurston’s lifetime, selling fewer than 5,000 copies before going out of print in the late 1960s. Its 1978 reissue met with greater success, selling over 200,000 copies in the next 10 years.

Native Son sold 215,000 copies within three weeks of publication. The book made Wright the wealthiest Black writer in America of his era.

Capote first learned of the murder in The New York Times and travelled to Kansas with his good friend Harper Lee to conduct interviews and research everyone involved in the case.

“So it goes,” Slaughterhouse-Five’s melancholic refrain, appears in the text 106 times.

Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991, preceded by Pearl S. Buck (1938), John Steinbeck (1962), and Marquez (1982).

Petry's The Street sold 20,000 advance copies and was first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.