Radio was a fairly new technology when the novel Magnificent Obsession was published in 1929, and it was another of the factors that helped the novel become a bestseller. In an earlier post, I mentioned that at least one of the women who reviewed the book did so on radio. That was Mrs. Edward E. Draper of Troy, New York, who broadcast a weekly program called “Current Bookshelf” over WOKO, Port of Albany. There may have been other radio reviews, but that was the only one noted in Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession scrapbook.
Because the medium was new, local stations experimented with many different kinds of programming. One type of program was the reading of books over the air. This was done, for example, by Eddie Albright at station KNX, “The Voice of Hollywood.” The clipping below, from Douglas’s scrapbook (without the name of the newspaper or the date), gives an unflattering description of his program:
By his own estimation, Allbright had been reading books on-air for “six or seven years” before he did Magnificent Obsession in the Fall of 1930. But Douglas’s book stood out for him. As he told Douglas (see letter below), “I have said over the air, and I say it to you now, that the book will change the lives of all who read it. It has something which I have never hoped to find in a novel. Something that HELPS.”
That kind of enthusiastic radio endorsement was better than a commercial. And even if it was, indeed, only heard by housewives going about their work, it surely must have helped boost sales, especially just before Christmas, the major book-buying time of the year.
Douglas himself also spoke on the radio occasionally, and he would do it more frequently in years to come. While still a pastor in Montreal, he gave a radio address on July 20, 1930, in which he spoke at great length about the thesis of Magnificent Obsession and encouraged his listeners to do what Jesus talks about in Matthew 6. I am reserving the details of that speech for a subsequent post, but for now I just want to point out that the radio played a significant role in spreading the word about Douglas’s novel.
There were other influences that helped the book along, and some of them came as a surprise to Douglas. I’ll give you an example in my next post.
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 