The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Publishing Miracle 13: The Call to Action

In this series I have listed a number of factors that called the public’s attention to the novel Magnificent Obsession after its publication in 1929. Once people became aware of the book, then there were some distinctive features of it that kept them reading and talking about it. But the book did more than that: it also gave them something to do.

Nancy Ashford comes right out and says this in Chapter 11 when she tells Bobby Merrick that, if Doctor Hudson’s journal were to be published, “People would pronounce it utterly incredible, of course; but they would read it – and heartily wish it were true. And I have a notion they would be sneaking off to make experiments, no matter how they might have giggled when discussing the theory with their friends.”

Magnificent Obsession isn’t just a novel; it’s an invitation to try the thing yourself, and see what happens.

Nancy continues, “I wish I could tell you… you know why I cannot… about the quite startling experiences I myself have had lately…” She can’t tell him because it’s all about serving others and not bragging about it to anybody. But it’s implied that she has done a deed of kindness and has hidden up that secret for her and God alone, and her prayer-life has become more constructive as a result. This isn’t your typical novel. Most of them don’t give the reader something to try after they’re done reading.

But Douglas goes one step further: he hints that he would welcome a letter from them, telling him the results of their experiments.

In Chapter Thirteen, Merrick shares Doctor Hudson’s “secret” with Montgomery Brent, and Brent says he’s going to try it. “May I write to you, sometimes, and report?” Brent asks.

Merrick says, “Glad to have you. But you needn’t try to tell me what you’re doing for anybody else. That’s your affair. Write and tell me if it works – but not what you did to make it work. Do you get me?”

And that’s exactly what readers did. As Douglas tells us in his “Author’s Foreword” to Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal, “After a while, letters began to arrive from persons who said they had tried it, and it worked; though they were careful not to be too specific in reporting their adventures, aware that if they told they would be sorry” (p. ix). Of course, not everyone had positive results. “A few lamented the cost of unrewarded experiments and denounced the whole idea as a lot of hooey.” He adds, “The task of dealing sympathetically with this strange correspondence became a grave responsibility” (p. x).

This, perhaps more than anything else, is what made Magnificent Obsession stand out from other novels: it created a community. People “tried” the book’s thesis and corresponded with Douglas about the results. And he wrote back. For the rest of his life, much of his time was spent answering letters like these. Douglas says, “A single post might contain inquiries from a high school boy, a college professor, a farmer’s wife, a physician, a pious old lady, an actress, a postman, a preacher, and a sailor…. I suppose that if all these letters were compiled and printed, they would fill several volumes as large as the novel which evoked them.”

There is evidence that Douglas considered doing something along that line. Around 1932-33, he wrote a To-Do List about these letters, then folded it up and stuck it in the back inside pocket of his Forgive Us Our Trespasses scrapbook. In the To-Do List he said he was going to “Take off mailing addresses from letters,” and then “Letters will be stored.” He seems to have had some long-range plans for them, but he doesn’t mention what he had in mind.

On a personal note, this “Strange Correspondence” is the first thing I looked for when I began studying Douglas’s private papers at the University of Michigan in 2005. Rather than a biography of Douglas, I initially wanted to write the story of this community-building that he did through letter writing. Unfortunately, other than fan letters from GIs during WWII (to which I do devote a chapter in my Douglas biography), Douglas’s daughters did not donate his fan mail to the university archives.

However, the main point I want to make today is that Magnificent Obsession prompted readers to go out and “try” the book’s thesis – and apparently many of them did. In that respect, it was more than a novel. For many people, reading it was a life-changing experience.

Publishing Miracle 12: The Mystery Page

by Ronald R Johnson

I’ve been listing specific reasons why the novel Magnificent Obsession became a bestseller after its publication in 1929. In today’s post I’ll cover one of the most talked-about reasons: in Doctor Hudson’s secret journal, he says he learned “the secret to power” from a sculptor who clipped a passage out of the Bible and carried it around in his wallet. The author, Lloyd Douglas, wrote the story in a way that builds suspense around the question: “What was on that page?” He gives the essence of the answer, but he never tells his audience what page of the Bible it was.

Here is the passage in which he comes the closest to giving the answer:

From page 138 of the original printing of Magnificent Obsession. This scene is in Chapter 8.

As Laurine Wanamaker Schwan wrote in the Akron Journal shortly after the book’s release (11/1/1929): “This idea is hidden, indeed, in as much mystery and pomp as you will find anywhere. But it is disclosed in bits with much vivid action in between – in bits just big enough to whet your curiosity and interest. And – here is the master stroke of all – is never entirely revealed!”

There is simply this reference to the biblical admonition not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. For anyone who knows the Bible (or has access to a good concordance), that’s enough of a clue to find the passage Douglas has in mind. But why didn’t Douglas give the answer?

Here’s what he said later, in his “Author’s Preface” to Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal in 1939 (p. ix):

“The theme of the novel had derived from a little handful of verses midway of the Sermon on the Mount, but all references to the enchanted passage were purposely vague, the author feeling that a treasure hunt in Holy Writ would probably do his customers no harm. Within the first twelve months after publication, more than two thousand people had written to inquire, ‘What page of the Bible did the sculptor carry in his wallet?’ We left off counting these queries, but they have continued to come, all through these intervening years.”

Notice that even now he didn’t give chapter and verse. If you don’t know where the Sermon on the Mount can be found, you’re out of luck. If you do, then you’ll find it exactly where he says: at the midway point of it.

Why all the secrecy? First of all, because this was his ingenious way of attracting the attention of people who didn’t go to church and wouldn’t be interested in hearing about the Bible under normal circumstances. Second, because citing chapter and verse would have broken the spell. This is a mainstream novel, not Christian fiction. Third, as he says in the paragraph I just quoted, he was hoping his readers would get their hands on a Bible and go for “a treasure hunt,” just like Bobby Merrick ends up doing in the novel.

Laurine Wanamaker Schwan, whose review in the Akron Journal I mentioned a moment ago, thought there might be a fourth reason: “Those who want to see this philosophy in black and white are given a hint as to where they may find it for themselves. And this again is a master stroke. For those who might say, ‘Ho hum! Now what is important about that?’ will never be able to find it. Only those few who will click with its meaning… will ever actually see that idea in cold print!” This is an intriguing suggestion, for it echoes what some scholars believe to be the reason for the so-called “Messianic Secret” in the gospels: to communicate with those who are receptive while keeping critics in the dark. But Douglas himself never said this was his intention.

At any rate, Douglas’s technique of keeping the Bible verses a secret was effective, as the two thousand inquiries he received shows. But it’s interesting to see how reviewers handled this feature of the book.

One reviewer gave it away, without so much as a Spoiler Alert. This was in an article entitled, “Unknown, Read by 150,000,” in the Chicago Herald Examiner (2/20/1932). After admitting that the book’s popularity was due, in large part, to the “mystery of the message in a secret code to be solved,” the review ends with these words: “The ‘magic page’ is apparently Matthew vi:1-6.” (Yeah, thanks a lot. What a killjoy!)

One columnist teased his readers, pretending he was about to reveal the secret… then didn’t. He wrote in his final paragraph: “The scriptural passage in which Dr. Hudson found the secret of his power and which is transmitted to Dr. Merrick is not revealed. The reader is privileged to guess. My own is – but this is Lloyd Douglas’s book.” (W. F. Hardy, “As I View the Thing,” Decatur (IL) Herald, n.d.)

Ozora Davis, writing to an audience of ministers and biblical scholars in the Chicago Theological Seminary Register must have felt that information was more important than letting his colleagues discover it for themselves: “The Sermon on the Mount is in [this book],” he said, “and it is such a comment on the sixth chapter of Matthew as I have not read in many a day.” In this case, Douglas didn’t mind the spoiler. A recommendation from Ozora Davis was a big deal in those days.

One religious periodical scolded Douglas for keeping the passage a secret. The reviewer in Personal Power (October, 1931) wrote, “For the benefit of those who cannot find the scripture passage upon which Randolph’s secret was based, look up Matt. 6:2-7. As a preacher, Dr. Douglas should not have kept people guessing like that.”

A severe critic from Birmingham, Alabama, however, went in the opposite direction: he believed that Douglas had kept the passage a secret because the actual biblical text did not support Douglas’s interpretation. Dean Gilbert W. Mead of Birmingham-Southern College, wrote in the Birmingham News-Age-Herald (3/26/1933), “From the first I felt, as probably many another reader did, that the author was playing a cheap trick on us by never telling us just what was the exact scriptural reference out of which the whole obsession grew…. [T]here isn’t a single thing I can see hindering Mr. Douglas from telling us right out what the discovery was – citing chapter and verse – except, perhaps, that he didn’t dare chance the flimsiness of his absurd structure by exhibiting the weakness of the foundation.”

Whatever one’s opinion may be of the technique Douglas used, it was effective. It got people talking. It prompted thousands of them to write to him, asking questions about the Bible. It motivated columnists and reviewers to write about the book in newspapers all across the country. It accomplished, in other words, what every novelist tries to do, and most fall short of: it made an impression on the larger culture.

But, for many readers, it did something more – something that novels rarely do: it offered a call to action. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Publishing Miracle 11: The Coded Message

by Ronald R Johnson

One interesting feature of the novel Magnificent Obsession is the fact that Doctor Hudson’s journal was written in code, to prevent people from discovering his secret too easily. When Nancy Ashford presents the diary to Bobby Merrick, he is determined to crack the code. Here is the first page of it:

In Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession scrapbook, there is at least one critic who complains that the code is easy and that it takes Merrick much longer than necessary to decipher it. Personally, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

Nancy and Bobby figure out one thing immediately: Dr. Hudson used the last letter of the Greek alphabet, omega, to indicate the end of a line, and he used the Greek letter mu to indicate the halfway point. This was a clue to divide each line into two, like so:

As an example of Douglas’s skill as a storyteller, he has Merrick work on the puzzle so late into the night that he falls asleep at his desk. The next morning when the butler comes to call him to breakfast, he finds him like this, then goes down to the kitchen and tells the cook, “You lost your bet!”

“Drunk again?”

“Quite!”

After the accident that saved his life at the expense of Dr. Hudson’s, Merrick has sworn off alcohol. This is a humorous scene that shows the household staff jumping to conclusions, just like we all do in real life.

Later on, having no better ideas, Merrick tries separating the letters and shifting the second half of the line slightly to the right…

Although I still wouldn’t have seen it, Merrick realizes that the key is to take the first letter from the top line, the second from the bottom line, the third from the top, and so on. He comes up with this:

“Reader, I consider you my friend…”

This is just the beginning, of course. He still has to decipher the whole journal in order to learn the secret that Dr. Hudson worked so hard to conceal. But this is just one example of the way Douglas keeps us in suspense.

When reviewers mentioned the code, they usually included it as one of the interesting features of the book. Some complained about it, however.

From The Congregationalist: “Dr. Douglas does, however, make a certain concession to the present age in surrounding rather simple and elemental Christian facts and experiences with an element of mystery and the occult. Our own judgment is that the diary of the famous surgeon which figures so prominently in the story would have been made both artistically and spiritually more effective if it had been plainly presented in simple English rather than in the unique code which, without the key that Dr. Douglas supplies, would have been difficult to decipher. However, Dr. Douglas probably knows his age and the unreadiness of the sophisticated to appreciate simple things simply stated.”

Lighten up! True, Douglas used the coded diary as a way of getting his audience interested, but there’s also a more basic truth here: a coded diary is fun. Douglas wanted us to enjoy reading Magnificent Obsession, and judging from the reviews in his scrapbook, many people did.

The message that Merrick deciphers is based on a page of scripture that is talked about but never entirely revealed. And that is another reason why Magnificent Obsession became “a publishing miracle.” I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Publishing Miracle 10: Kansas City (and Other Cities)

by Ronald R Johnson

Lists of bestsellers, such as those printed in the New York Times or USA Today, are compiled from periodic reports submitted by certain designated bookstores around the country. These reports may not always be accurate, but they give at least a general idea of the top books that are selling at each of those stores.

After the publication of Magnificent Obsession in 1929, its publisher, Willett, Clark & Colby, had access to sales information for that book and shared it with the novel’s author, Lloyd Douglas. It’s not clear how much time Douglas spent looking at these stats for his earlier non-fiction books, but he became an expert on the subject from Magnificent Obsession onward, keeping track of where his books sold and correlating it with other facts, such as advertising campaigns or his own personal appearances. For this reason, some remarks he made in 1935 are especially helpful in tracing sales of Magnificent Obsession.

This is jumping ahead in the story, but in January 1935 he wrote a letter to his agent/editor Rich Kent, advising him on where to spend advertising dollars for his newest novel, Green Light. “I believe a little ad in a Kansas City paper – The Star, maybe – would do some good. That’s the plexus which drove Magnificent Obsession. Kansas City. They took it up first. They put me on the map…. Kansas City is really the center of the largest sales we had of that book” (LCD to Ira Rich Kent, 1/28/1935).

A Life Magazine photo of a Kansas City streetcorner in the 1930s. From the Amazing Vintage Photos website https://www.vintag.es/2012/04/old-photos-of-kansas-city-in-1938.html?m=1

It would be fascinating to probe deeper and find out why that city was the one where his book sold best. Viewed superficially, it was a mob town, ruled by Tom Pendergast; but as David McCullough notes in Truman (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1992/93), pp. 196-198), despite the Great Depression, life in Kansas City “had never been better” than in the early 1930s (the very time in which Kansas City’s residents were buying Magnificent Obsession). “Compared to other cities,” writes McCullough, “the Kansas City outlook was confident and expansive. There were jobs, and local government – the organization – was providing most of them” (196). It was, in other words, a complex social situation that defies easy analysis, but there were people in that place who actually governed well (including a young judge named Harry Truman), and the overall mood seems to have been upbeat.

It is surely significant, also, that Kansas City was the headquarters of Unity, Inc. Douglas was surprised by the enthusiastic response his novel received from that spiritual organization. He joked to a friend, “Oddly enough, several metaphysical cults have reviewed the book at considerable length and have adopted me into their respective households of faith. Whether, at the present writing, I am in better standing as a Christian Scientist, a member of ‘Unity, Incorporated,’ or as a preacher in the rather conventional ‘United Church of Canada,’ is not quite clear” (LCD to Jewell Stevens, 10/6/1930).

In Douglas’s scrapbook is the July 1930 issue of a Unity publication called Scientific Christian Training. The first 18 pages of that issue are devoted to a retelling of key parts of Douglas’s story. Richard Lynch, the editor, writes, “Here, in brief, is an interpretation of a section of the Sermon on the Mount and of its instructions as to how to draw on the universal Supply that I have never come across before. It is but a reinforcement of all the teachings of Unity” (p. 17).

Douglas shouldn’t have been surprised. In its vocabulary and teachings, Magnificent Obsession seems to agree with the basic principles of Unity as laid out in James Dillet Freeman’s book, The Story of Unity (Lee’s Summit, MO: Unity School of Christianity, 1965). What Douglas offered as a metaphor (God as a form of energy, for example, or Christianity as a kind of science), the Unity organization had been saying very seriously since the late 1800s. To the extent that Kansas City “put [Douglas] on the map,” it may have been because his book was embraced by leaders within the Unity organization.

But Kansas City wasn’t the only metropolitan area that bought the book in large numbers. In his letter to his agent/editor, Douglas also mentions “Buffalo, Chicago…. Nashville. Dallas. Atlanta. Magnificent Obsession and Forgive Us [his second novel] have been rated as bestsellers in Atlanta, GA, for years and years!”

Atlanta was another interesting case. I assume he meant “white” Atlanta, because the city and the state were heavily segregated, and there was little in Magnificent Obsession that would have appealed to the day-to-day lives of people of color. But, as in Kansas City, the white people of Atlanta were optimistic in the years leading up to Magnificent Obsession’s publication and were working to bring their city up to date. They considered themselves part of the New South, and they did what they could to attract business and encourage the arts. (See Darlene R. Roth and Andy Ambrose, Metropolitan Frontiers: A Short History of Atlanta (Marietta, GA: Longstreet Press, 1996), chapter three.) Where Atlanta differed from Kansas City was in its response to the Stock Market Crash in 1929: Kansas City was still doing well in the early 1930s, but Atlanta was hurting.

In many respects, Atlanta seems to have been like Akron during the years that Douglas was there: growing fast, trying to become urbane, but also dealing with significant economic decline. Under those conditions, Akron had drawn inspiration from Douglas’s ideas. Perhaps Atlanta liked him for many of the same reasons.

I haven’t even begun to probe this subject (why particular cities responded more enthusiastically than others to Douglas’s novel), and I’m not sure that I can. Douglas didn’t have enough information himself to draw inferences about that. All he knew was that Magnificent Obsession sold well in certain metropolitan areas. He didn’t know why.

Here’s a commonsense suggestion. It’s probably safe to say that word-of-mouth advertising, in 1929, 1930, and 1931, was most effective at the local level. If a person bought the book because they heard about it from a friend, that friend was probably someone they interacted with face-to-face. Long-distance telephone service wasn’t a part of people’s daily life yet. Letter writing was, and that may have played a role, but, of course, none of the technologies that are so much a part of our lives today (telephone, internet, social media) were available then. So it may be safe to say that good sales in one city and poor sales in another may have had a lot to do with word-of-mouth advertising (or the lack thereof) in each of those cities.

And while we’re on the subject of conversation, the novel itself had certain features that lent itself to discussion around the watercooler and elsewhere. I’ll talk about that in my next post.

Publishing Miracle 9: Radio

by Ronald R Johnson

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.

Publishing Miracle 8: The Jules Verne Touch

by Ronald R Johnson

I am retracing the steps by which the novel Magnificent Obsession became a bestseller. I’ve already mentioned the support the book received from local newspapers and from people within the medical profession. Today we’ll see how those two factors intersected: a development in medical technology mirrored an important series of events in the novel, and this fact was reported in at least one newspaper.

In the novel, Dr. Merrick is trying to decrease mortality during brain surgery by inventing a tool that simultaneously cuts brain tissue and cauterizes the area around it, preventing bleeding. He has the general idea, but he can’t quite figure out how to place the vacuum tubes. This is all crucial to the plot because, as he meets the requirements of Dr. Hudson’s “theory” (or in other words, does what Jesus teaches in the opening verses of Matthew 6), he has a moment of clarity in which he sees the details that have been eluding him. Not only does he build the device and revolutionize brain surgery, but he also experiences the reality of God in the process.

Douglas didn’t make this up off the top of his head. In an interview with the Montreal Gazette (reported 11/25/1932), he said, “I started Magnificent Obsession while I was in California, before I came to Montreal. There I knew Dr. Carl Wheeler Rand, who is considered the most eminent brain surgeon on the west coast. I went to him and told him I had a strong desire to have a character in my book invent some surgical device and asked him if any work was being done along that line. He said that tentative experiments had been made with an electric cautery, but they had never been successful. He added that if I used the idea, it was possible there would be a few surgeons who would be interested in the fact.” Then he added, “Dr. Rand gave me nothing by way of detail, and when young Dr. Merrick thought in his dream of rearranging his vacuum tubes, it was my own idea.”

The Gazette interviewed Douglas because of a news item that had come to them over the wire from Des Moines, Iowa, where a man named Paul C. Rawls had demonstrated for local surgeons a device just like the one Merrick invents in Magnificent Obsession. The Gazette quoted the dispatch from Des Moines as saying, “Paul C. Rawls, the inventor who was granted a patent yesterday, explained how the use of vacuum tubes enabled him to obtain higher frequency electric current, thereby making possible the new knife.”

In their headline, the Gazette claimed that Douglas had “the Jules Verne touch.” They were referring to the science fiction writer whose novels anticipated many technological breakthroughs.

Below is a copy of the first page of Mr. Rawls’s patent. Click here for the link to Patent Number 1,945,867 on Google Patents. Below is an image of the diagram included with that patent.

What mystifies me about all this is that, in 1926, three years before the publication of Magnificent Obsession, Dr. Harvey Cushing invented a device which (if I am not mistaken) fits the same general description. As Elizabeth H. Thomson notes in her biography, Harvey Cushing: Surgeon, Author, Artist (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), Cushing realized as a medical student at Harvard in 1894 that bleeding would have to be controlled before brain surgery could be done successfully (p. 62). By 1910 he had begun using silver clips (p. 171), which helped somewhat; but he kept working on the problem.

Thomson writes: “In the autumn of 1926, Cushing used for the first time an electric cautery apparatus in a brain operation. In general surgery and in genito-urinary surgery, high-frequency currents had been used for some time in dealing with both benign and malignant growths, but it was Cushing who established their value in neurological surgery. With the cooperation of Dr. W. T. Bovie, a physicist with the Harvard Cancer Commission who had previously developed apparatus for dealing with cancerous growths, he experimented with currents and equipment until they had one current that would cut tissue without attendant bleeding and another that would coagulate a vessel which might have to be cut during the course of an operative procedure” (pp. 247-248).

There is no mention of vacuum tubes, but the device itself sounds very much like the one Merrick invents in Douglas’s novel. This in no way diminishes Douglas’s reputation as a novelist, but if we’re going to talk about the real-world invention of this device, it seems to me that Dr. Cushing beat P. C. Rawls. However, based on Douglas’s conversation with Dr. Carl Wheeler Rand, which I presume took place in 1928 when Douglas was writing the novel, Dr. Rand and his West Coast associates had so far been unable to reproduce Dr. Cushing’s work with complete success.

What this means for Douglas is that he was aware of the problem that brain surgeons were trying to solve in the last years of the 1920s, and he built that problem and its likely solution into his novel. This made his novel current and fresh and based on facts – something you don’t normally get from a novel.

Below, also from Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession scrapbook, is a clipping about a doctor in Boston demonstrating a similar device. This clipping doesn’t say whether it’s the one invented by Harvey Cushing (in Boston) or the one invented by P. C. Rawls, or maybe a third invention. At any rate, it’s another instance that shows how current Douglas’s novel was, and why so many health professionals were interested in his book.

Publishing Miracle 7: The Medical Profession

by Ronald R Johnson

I’ve been talking about the reasons the novel Magnificent Obsession became a bestseller after its release in the fall of 1929. One very important reason was the fact that it was a medical drama. We’re used to that sort of thing now; it seems like there’s always, at any time, at least one current TV series set in a hospital. But in 1929, it was rare for novelists to be able to write authoritatively about the lives of doctors and nurses.

As Reader’s Digest editor Charles Ferguson would later write in Cosmopolitan Magazine, “So authentic and convincing are the medical passages in the novels of Doctor Lloyd Cassel Douglas that not a few of the thousands of letters he receives each year are addressed to him as a medico. These letters detail the clinical histories of people who have suffered many things and now come to him as a last resort. Nor is this surprising. Every reference he makes to a disease or its treatment is invariably checked by the best authorities. Moreover, while Lloyd Douglas never studied medicine, he has read avidly on medical topics since early college days when the hankering to be a doctor first laid hold on him” (Charles W. Ferguson, “Lloyd C. Douglas, Cosmopolite,” Cosmopolitan, November 1938, p. 8).

And doctors noticed.

The magazine, American Medicine, printed a review of Magnificent Obsession. “This is one of the most unusual novels we have read in a long time,” the reviewer said – and it must have been unusual, indeed, for a novel of any kind to be reviewed in a medical journal. The reviewer explains why it seemed appropriate: “The setting for the story is medical throughout, and remarkably true to life, even to the accurate description of the latest technique in blood transfusion…. Whether one regards this book as a theme story or as a human-interest novel, it is well worth reading, especially for those in the medical profession or associated with it. The present reviewer, in fact, picked up the volume one night after dinner, and could not bring himself to put it down until he had reached the last page many hours later.”

Another medical journal, The Canadian Lancet and Practitioner, also gave the book a positive review.

And doctors wrote to Douglas. On one occasion Douglas compiled some blurbs from his fan mail and gave them to his publisher for possible use in advertising. (This can be found in the Jewell Stevens File, Moore Library, Special Collections, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.) Here is one of those comments:

“From a prominent physician in Oklahoma City: ‘I have read this book through twice; parts of it several times more. The medical references are correct; excellent! What percent of this book is fiction?'” (That question at the end must have made Douglas smile.)

As I mentioned in earlier posts, Douglas was well-connected with the faculty at the University of Michigan Medical School during his days in Ann Arbor, from 1915 to 1921, and he stayed in touch with some of them. One was Dr. G. Carl Huber, who was Dean of the University of Michigan’s graduate school when Magnificent Obsession came out, but for many years before that was a respected faculty member at the medical school, well known for his work in neurosurgery. Carl Huber makes an appearance in Chapter 8 of Magnificent Obsession. Bobby Merrick, who is going through medical training, gushes about his Anatomy professor, whom he calls “old Huber.” He tells Nancy Ashford:

“And old Huber’s a prince! He handles those poor cadavers as if they were our relatives. I’ll bet if some of them had been given as much tender consideration while alive as Huber gives them in the lab, they might have lived longer… Buries their ashes, Huber does, at the end of the semester… conventional interment – bell, book and clergy… Contends that these paupers and idiots and criminals, however much they may have burdened their communities while they lived, have so completely discharged their obligation to society by their service in the lab, that they deserve honorable burial… A fine old boy is Huber, believe me!”

Douglas sent a copy of the novel to Huber and received the following letter back, dated November 11, 1929:

“My dear Dr. Douglas:

“Thank you very sincerely for the copy of your novel, Magnificent Obsession. The book came to the laboratory and was taken to the house and read by Mrs. Huber before I had a chance to really see it. She, and other members of the family, pointed with real pride to a certain page on which you referred to me. It is nice of you to think of me in this way, and although I have a recollection that I once stated that you might refer to the incident if you did not use my name, that was long ago, and I will pretend that I have forgotten, as I see you did forget. I am taking the spirit of it as sincere.

“I enjoyed the book as a whole very much. I found it quite worthwhile reading. Your characters are not all creatures of the imagination – I have met them, and all have interest. The entire novel is worked out very nicely, and I enjoyed it more knowing its author and having recognition of his worth.”

That last paragraph is especially interesting, since it tells us that other characters besides Dr. Huber were based on real people at the University of Michigan Medical School.

Incidentally, Douglas mentioned Dr. Huber in an article in the Akron Times-Press. After briefly describing the passage in the book about him, Douglas said, “I had a letter from him the other day. He said he was surprised to find himself in a novel he was reading without a thought that the story had any relation to him. That would be a funny sensation, wouldn’t it?” I gather, instead, that Dr. Huber was a bit chagrined at seeing his name in a novel when he had probably just expected Douglas to use the incident in a sermon sometime.

At any rate, the medical connection helped boost sales of the book, not only because doctors and other health professionals became interested in it, but also because the general public liked such stories. As a reviewer in the Chicago Herald Examiner wrote, “Its story has many reasons for general appeal.” The first reason he gives is this: “It concerns the always fascinating atmosphere of medicine and surgery.”

But there is a more specific way in which the medical aspect helped generate interest in the book: in the novel, Merrick achieves a technological breakthrough in brain surgery that was actually occurring in real life at that time. I’ll tell you more about that in my next post.

Publishing Miracle 6: Canada

by Ronald R Johnson

I’ve been explaining how the novel Magnificent Obsession became so successful after its publication in 1929. One factor that was especially serendipitous was the support Douglas received from Canadians.

As I noted in earlier posts, in the spring of 1929 Douglas and his wife Besse moved to Montreal, where he served as pastor of the St. James Church. This congregation was part of the United Church of Canada, a denomination that had been formed four years earlier from a merger of Methodist, Congregational, Presbyterian, and other churches in the Canadian provinces. As in earlier seasons of his life, Douglas’s influence spread well beyond the city in which he served. He was often invited to speak in Toronto and other cities in Ontario. He was well-received and was already well-known throughout that region of Canada by the time his novel was published in the fall of 1929.

Within the publishing realm, Canada was a separate entity from the United States. US publishers didn’t just distribute their books throughout the provinces as though they were extensions of the fifty states. Publishers had to form relationships with Canadian publishers and sign agreements with them to distribute their books within Canada.

As a small publishing house, Willett, Clark & Colby, the company that published Magnificent Obsession, had a very informal agreement with Douglas. There was no contract, per se. And they lacked any official relationship with Canadian publishers. So Douglas made his own agreement with the Thomas Allen Company in Toronto. Instead of just distributing the American version of the book, the Thomas Allen Company actually printed their own Canadian version. Although the text wasn’t different from the American version, the fact that the Canadian books contained the Thomas Allen imprint and said they were printed in Canada gave them the appearance of having originated within Canada rather than being an American import. And the misimpression this created turned out to be helpful to Douglas, for Canadians took special pride in what they perceived as Canadian books.

For example, in her column in The Sherbrooke Telegram, Anne Merrill was surprised that a local YWCA library in Sherbrooke, Quebec, didn’t have a copy of Magnificent Obsession on its shelves. She said, “Had this really great book been written by a man in the USA, high-powered salesmen would have been set to work on it, till it was pushed into the million class!” In other words, she thought it was a Canadian book written by a Canadian author, and she lamented that it wasn’t being hyped to the extent that it would have been if it had been published in America. In his scrapbook, Douglas drew a smiley face beside her comment.

A similar remark was made in the Calgary Daily Herald: “Seldom, if ever, has the fiction product of a Canadian author met with such sales success in the Canadian field in so short a time.”

As I said, this was a misimpression. Douglas was not a Canadian author. (Anyone who heard him speak would know instantly that he was an American. Having grown up in Indiana and northern Kentucky, he had that uniquely nasal Indiana twang.) But some Canadians thought he was one of them, and even those who knew better took pride in his connection with them as pastor of the church in Montreal. This boosted sales throughout the Canadian provinces in a way that did not ordinarily happen with American books.

In appreciation of this fact, Douglas would remain loyal to the Thomas Allen Company for the rest of his life, insisting on signing separate Canadian contracts with that publisher for all of his novels, instead of letting his American publisher work out arrangements in Canada.

Sales of Magnificent Obsession also benefitted from Douglas’s special connection to another influential interest group: the medical profession. I’ll tell you more about that in my next post.

Publishing Miracle 5: Newspapers

by Ronald R Johnson

We’re still talking about the factors that made Magnificent Obsession a bestseller. Perhaps you’ve noticed that some of the factors mentioned in previous posts were picked up by the newspapers. The clergy preached about Lloyd Douglas’s book to their own flocks, but then their message was amplified by being repeated in the papers. Reading groups and women’s circles reviewed the book amongst themselves and enjoyed refreshments afterwards (one of them had hot cocoa and cake), but their influence was broadened as summaries of their meetings were printed in the local papers.

The press was an important factor in Douglas’s success all along, even in his earliest days as a pastor. I’ve mentioned again and again how he was the darling of the local journalists, mostly because he knew how to supply them with usable information about his sermons and speeches, complete with soundbites. He gave them “copy” they could easily print without much editing, but he also thought like they did and presented his ideas in a way that would be considered “newsworthy.”

In the course of my Lloyd Douglas research, I’ve read a lot of smalltown newspapers from those years (1903 to his death in 1951), and one thing that stands out is a shift in what was considered “news.” One hundred years ago, local newspapers chronicled the daily lives of the people in their towns or cities. The focus wasn’t on shocking the reader; it was on keeping townspeople informed on who was doing what. While Douglas resided in Washington, DC, for instance (from 1909 to 1911), the newspapers printed the names of women who were accepting “calls” that day – in other words, women who were available to receive visitors from others in their social class. It was useful information that also tells us a lot about who these people were and how they lived.

This feature of local newspapers (their ability to reflect their readers’ daily lives) was especially helpful in spreading the word about Douglas’s novel. As each city’s influencers reviewed the book, the newspapers recorded that fact and increased awareness to people who were not present at those events.

Many newspapers also had a Book Review section. Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession scrapbook contains a number of reviews of his book from newspapers in small towns and big cities throughout North America. And because he had made an impression on the journalists in each of the cities where he had served as pastor, the papers in those places treated the book’s publication as a newsworthy event in its own right.

Chief among these was the Times-Press of Akron, Ohio. Douglas was treated as a local celebrity during the years he served as pastor in Akron (1921-1926), and they still revered him and printed news about him for some years afterwards. When Magnificent Obsession was published in the fall of 1929, that newspaper purchased the rights to serialize the novel, beginning in December of that year. Here’s the announcement:

And, when they printed the book in serial form, they did it in style. They gave each episode a nice banner…

…and had a local artist draw illustrations: of Perry Ruggles trying to rescue Dr. Hudson from drowning…

…and of Nurse Nancy Ashford talking with Bobby Merrick in the hospital after his accident:

I’m not going to claim that the artwork was exemplary (the images of Nancy and Bobby are not quite how I would envision them), but I do think that the newspaper did its very best to present Douglas’s book to the Akron reading public in a positive light. And that was something Douglas greatly appreciated.

We’re retracing the steps that led to the success of Magnificent Obsession, and the attention of newspapers was certainly one of those steps. Another contributing factor was Douglas’s move to Montreal. I mentioned in an earlier post that he left Los Angeles at the beginning of 1929 to serve as pastor of St. James United Church of Montreal. As it turned out, that one little detail benefitted the book’s sales in a way that Douglas could not have predicted. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Publishing Miracle 4: The Women

by Ronald R Johnson

In my last post, I told you how members of the clergy in North America helped boost sales of the novel Magnificent Obsession after its publication in 1929; but they weren’t the only ones spreading the word. Women’s groups were also helpful. In Douglas’s list of important influencers, he names twice as many women reviewers as he does ministers:

*Mrs. Ada Turnbull, Monmouth, IL
*Mrs. Buena Mimms, Ocala, FL
*Mrs. R. C. Richey, Memphis, TN (at home of Mrs. W. L. Meux at Whitehaven)
*Mrs. M. R. Elikan, Bellaire, OH
*Mrs. Abe Levin, Youngstown, OH
*Mrs. J. H. Davis, Birmingham, AL
*Miss Sue Reese, Salisbury, NC
*Mrs. Charles Gilliam, Warsaw, IN
*Mrs. Theodore A. Switz, East Orange, NJ
*Mrs. Cox, Marion, IL
*Mrs. Danna Sellenberger, Kokomo, IN
*Mrs. Alex Woldert, Tyler, TX
*Mrs. Judson Geppinger, Hamilton, OH
*Mrs. Jerome Lewis, East St. Louis, IL
*Mrs. John Whiteman, Ardmore, OK
*Mrs. Harry W. McGhee, Brownwood, TX
*Mrs. W. E. Smith, Elkhart, IN
*Miss Althea Montgomery, Dean of Women of the Junior College, Washington, IA
*Mrs. Leroy Flanegin, Peoria, IL
*Mrs. E. N. Stone, Chickasha, OK
*Mrs. Wm. B. Mathews, Newport News, VA
*Mrs. Myrna Moore, Oklahoma City, OK
*Mrs. John Garvin, Toronto, ON (Canada)
*Mrs. T. G. Landers, East St. Louis, IL
*Mrs. Lawrence Ely, member of the Westmoorland College Faculty, San Antonio, TX
*Mrs. L. J. Wathen, Dallas, TX
*Mrs. Telis Miller, Hickory, NC
*Mrs. F. E. Ornsby, Cedar Rapids, IA
*Mrs. W. P. Johnson (at Mrs. Frank R. Mayers), Lake Worth, FL
*Mrs. Bessie Kagay, Effingham, IL
*Mrs. Clyde Young, Fort Collins, CO
*Mrs. Harvey Tuel, Rogers, AR
*Mrs. Gable, Richmond, IN
*Mrs. Sophyl Ozersky Levin, Youngstown, OH
*Mrs. James S. King, St. Paul, MN
*Mrs. Clyde Hickerson, Russellville, AR
*Fannie Lou Morgan, Oklahoma City, OK
*Mrs. Odell R. Blair, Buffalo, NY
*Mrs. R. T. Fiske, Buffalo, NY
*Mrs. Wm. B. Gramlich, Kenton, OH
*Mrs. W. K. Royal, Portland, OR
*Mrs. Edward E. Draper, Troy, NY (broadcast over WOKO, Port of Albany, weekly program called “Current Bookshelf”)

Some of the reviews were given at churches, others at libraries, still others at community groups. One was called “The Housekeepers’ Book Club.” Here are a few clippings about them from Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession scrapbook. Note that this first one makes a mistake on the name of his book:

Some of these groups were very much into culture, reviewing Douglas’s book in the same afternoon as a study of Shakespeare…

And not all of these reviews were positive. One said that, from an artistic standpoint, the book was “negligible,” but the subject matter was important. Another said that the novel was more “rational” than “Christian.”

Women also wrote reviews in local newspapers. Some of these were the paper’s usual book reviewers, while others were columnists who took time out to write about Douglas’s book. As you may have noticed in the list of names above, one woman in New York had a local radio program for book reviews, and she did a segment on Douglas’s novel.

I am especially impressed, however, with a review written by a woman for a denominational paper, The Western Baptist. Her name was Jennie S. Hill, and I’m impressed because she picked up on things that few others – even among male reviewers – noticed.

“There is no padding,” she says, “no unnecessary description, while every trifling incident is vital to the story.” (Some might disagree with her, but Douglas wouldn’t have. He tried very hard to write his stories in a way that condensation of any kind would damage its integrity. I credit Miss Hill with recognizing how important this was to Douglas, even if I can’t defend every little detail of the book.)

“Then there is no ‘villain’ in the plot,” she continues. “One feels that the people are just ordinary people, some with more strength of mind than usual, but no single character so unusual as to be called impossible.” (Jennie Hill was the first person to acknowledge this fact in print: that Douglas found a way to make his stories suspenseful without demonizing any of his characters or turning them into villains. That is, in my mind, one of his great accomplishments, and very few reviewers seem to have noticed, even after he had written a number of novels that way. Many years later, a literature professor named Carl Bode would call it one of Douglas’s weaknesses, saying that his characters were too good. But Jennie Hill understood what Douglas was trying to do: portray humans as they appear to us in our own daily lives, not as “good guys” or “bad guys,” but as ordinary people trying to make their way in the world.)

Miss Hill also deserves credit for pinpointing one of the main weaknesses of Magnificent Obsession from the standpoint of communicating Douglas’s message: “The only criticism that could truthfully be made is that difficulties [within the story] are too often solved by the use of money. It is very human to conclude that money can do everything, and though that is decidedly untrue, the lessons that the author would teach would have been made more clear had not the possession of so much money really dimmed the motives of his chief character.” As she said a little earlier in her essay, the real point of the book is “the subduing of one’s own life in order to help someone else to raise his own standing. But to understand it, one must read the book.”

I’ve been analyzing what Noel Busch called “a publishing miracle,” telling you step-by-step how Magnificent Obsession became so well-known. This is one of the steps: women talked about it within their social circles and helped create “buzz.”

But their efforts were amplified by the local newspapers. In the early twentieth century, the life of the community was considered newsworthy in a way that is no longer true in the twenty-first century. I’ll discuss that in my next post.