Viking Portables was started in 1943 by Viking Press as a response to the wartime situation. The official story was that New Yorker critic, raconteur and man about town Alexander Woollcott had come up with the idea of creating an American equivalent of the "knapsack books" issued to the British military. The first Viking Portable was an anthology, As You Were, edited by Woollcott, containing stories and poems that Woollcott believed would be of particular interest to members of the military. In this creation story, it was the success of this volume in the military and civilian market that inspired Viking to turn this into a line of books that could be carried in a coat pocket. However, the speed with which the next volumes appeared was remarkable for a spur of the moment decision. More likely these volumes were already in the pipeline. Viking might well have been looking at the success of the paperbacks being distributed by the US Military in launching this line.
Viking Press had started in New York in 1925 with a mission of producing “a limited list of good nonfiction" and "distinguished fiction with some claim to permanent importance rather than ephemeral popular interest.” Rockwell Kent designed the logo and early titles included books by August Strindberg, Carl Van Doren, Vita Sackville-West, Mohandas Gandhi, Bertrand Russell and Thorsten Veblen. In the 1930s, Viking published Steinbeck, James Joyce and Graham Greene. (Info from the Viking Press website).
Some Viking Portables were devoted to a particular subject and others to a single author. The Faulkner volume that came out in April was the eighteenth title in the series. A volume devoted to Alexander Woollcott, who had died shortly before As You Were was released, also appeared in late April. Drama critic John Mason Brown wrote the introduction to the Woollcott volume. The Viking Portables retailed at $2 (about $22 in today's dollars), after a brief period when the price had been raised to $2.50 .
Many of the writers chosen for the Portables had made their mark in the 1920s or 1930s, widely regarded then as a Golden Age of American fiction. Publishing the works of these relatively contemporary writers alongside the acknowledged classics positioned them for inclusion in the literary canon.
The Viking Portables generally had a favorable critical reception. However the inclusion of excerpts from longer works in some volumes was controversial. The opponents believed excerpts could not adequately convey the strengths of the complete books. The renown of the writers, critics and scholars chosen to edit the volumes contributed to the acceptance of this series. The New York Times considered the books important enough to devote full reviews to most of them, often in the Sunday Book Review, The critics The Times assigned included some of the leading public intellectuals and literary critics of the day.
Readers also took to the books. Some titles had six-figure sales at a time when a sale of 20,000 copies was considered the benchmark of success, achieved by only about one-tenth of books published. Almost all major bookstores as well as department store book departments carried the Portables.
All sixteen titles that had been published to date were available and being promoted by Viking Press this week in April 1946. The titles included:
As You Were, edited by Alexander Woollcott. Woollcott had made his selection in consultation with his famous friends including Stephen Vincent Benet, Mark Van Doren and Carl Sandburg. The book had a novel format that would be followed by many subsequent Viking Portables: the works within each section were arranged by the chronology of the events they depicted rather than by the date they were written or published. During World War One, Woollcott had been editor of The Stars and Stripes so The New York Times Book Review assigned the critique of this anthology to Major Hartzell Spence, a founding editor of the corresponding World War Two military magazine, Yank. Spence wrote that while a majority of the selections in this anthology were sure fire crowd pleasers, about one-third smacked too much of the tortures of high school English class or were more likely to appeal to veterans of World War One than to the fighting men of 1943. He would have liked to have seen some stuff by John O’Hara, Damon Runyon and some of the popular Saturday Evening Post short story writers in the mix.
The Portable Steinbeck included Of Mice and Men and The Red Pony as well as sections from Tortilla Flat, Sea of Cortez, Bombs Away, The Pastures of Heaven, The Long Valley, In Dubious Battle, The Moon is Down and The Grapes of Wrath and 29 short stories. Pascal Covici, the editor who had brought Steinbeck to Viking, made the selections. Lewis Gannett, the book critic of the New York Herald Tribune, wrote the introduction. In his Sunday Times review, writer and critic Robert Penn Warren wrote that the collection showed Steinbeck at his best and his worst, faulting him for his lapses into sentimentality and theatricality.
The Triumph of Life. Horace Gregory, a poet, critic and Sarah Lawrence professor, was the editor of this volume of “poems of consolation for the English-speaking world,” first published in 1943 when the world was at war. The 600 pages contained 300 poems by 158 poets. Robert Gorham Davis, a literary critic and Harvard professor, wrote the review for The Times. He said this was a conservative selection, presenting mostly poems that celebrated the soul's triumph over death and focused largely on 17th and 18th century poets at the expense of the more popular and familiar poets of the 19th and 20th century. Meditations on death were a strange choice to send to a member of the armed forces at a time of war. The book seemed more fitting for the bereaved on the home front who may have recently lost a father, son or brother to the war.
The Portable Dorothy Parker contained all her stories and poems, including five short stories and one poem that had not been published in any previous book. W. Somerset Maugham wrote the introduction. It received an appreciative review from popular writer New Yorker writer John O’Hara in The Times Book Review in 1944. O’Hara, whose reputation plummeted in the coming decades when he pit out a series of steamy bestsellers, was considered a serious writer in 1946. He wrote that it was hard to imagine anyone who did not know who Dorothy Parker was and he recommended this book for those who had not gotten around to reading anything by her. In his review for The New Yorker, Edmund Wilson lamented the supposed decline in American literature since Parker’s heyday. J. Donald Adams in his “Speaking of Books” column for The New York Times Book Review derided Wilson’s comment, writing that maybe it was just that the world had moved beyond smug, witty cynicism and uncritical worship of Marxism since then. Parker, an icon of Jazz Age Manhattan, had abandoned New York for Hollywood in the 1940s.
The Portable World Bible contained selections from the scriptures of eight major religions. It was edited by Robert O. Ballou, a longtime book editor who had joined Viking Press in the 1940s. In his 1938 book, The Glory of God, written as a letter to his son, Ballou recounted his search for religious meaning outside of organized religion. In 1939, he edited the 1300-page The Bible of the World. Ballou focused on the theological essence of the holy books of eight world religions, eliminating most of the stories and ritual practices they contained. Both of his books included verses from the Bible, the Koran, and the holy books of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Hinduism.
The Portable Hemingway. Editor Malcolm Cowley included The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time and sections of A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls. To Have and To Have Not and Death in the Afternoon. In his introduction, Cowley sought to tie Hemingway’s writings together as an overall myth with repeated themes, as he did with the later Faulkner volume. University of Virginia professor Dan S. Norton, who reviewed the book for The Times Book Review in 1944. did not think that this collection worked in the way that Cowley intended.
Six Novels of the Supernatural. Editor Edward Wagenknecht, a literary critic and teacher, included Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie and Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The White People, The Beleaguered City by Mrs, Oliphant, The Return by Walter de la Mare, The Terror by Arthur Machen and Sweet Rocket by Mary Johnston. For the most part these were more fantasies than horror stories. Eudora Welty wrote in her review for The Times Book Review that the included novels all had been published between 1880 and 1920 and, besides being old-fashioned, were “as mild and faded as a pressed flower.” However, Portrait of Jennie actually was a bestseller in 1940 and had enough popular appeal that David O. Selznick filmed it in 1948. {In 1944 at the time of this review, Welty was interning at The New York Times Book Review, one of her several unsuccessful attempts to put down roots in New York City. She had built a reputation as a short story writer by then. "Delta Wedding," her first full-length novel, had been awarded the lead review position on April 14, 1946 in The New York Times Book Review. }
The Portable Shakespeare included seven complete plays, all of the sonnets and songs and famous passages from other works by Shakespeare. In his review for The New York Times Book Review, poet W.H. Auden wrote that this collection was worthwhile for the military man who had limited space for a library but he saw little value for the civilian who could easily find complete volumes of Shakespeare’s work. Auden then launched into a diatribe against the use of a readers poll to choose the selections, which he believed was an abnegation of critical and editorial responsibility. He apologized to Viking Press for using it as the object of his rant since Viking had a well deserved reputation for publishing quality fiction, including works like James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake that were often disparagingly tagged as “too difficult” as if easy readability was the measure of a book’s value.
The Portable Reader’s Companion. An eclectic selection of poetry, drama, stories, letters and essays from the preceding 2,000 years chosen by Louis Kronenberger, drama critic for Time. Kronenberger wrote that this compendium reflected his personal taste. Orville Prescott praised Kronenberger’s selection in his daily review column forThe New York Times. This assessment was echoed in W.B.C. Watkin’s review for the Times Book Review.
The Portable Carl Van Doren (1945). Carl Van Doren, who had taught English at Columbia like his brother Mark, was known to the literate public as a biographer and historian. He also had been an editor of The Nation, Century Magazine and the Literary Guild book club. He served as his own editor for this Viking Portable, including the complete text of his biography of Jonathan Swift, which he considered his best work, and his book of literary criticism, What is American Literature. This Viking Portable also included excerpts from his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Benjamin Franklin, as well as sections from Other Provinces, Secret History of the American Revolution and his autobiography, Three Worlds. Poet and critic Howard Moss, later poetry editor of The New Yorker, reviewed the book for The Times Book Review. He credited Van Doren as a biographer for neither romanticizing his subjects nor writing dogmatic theses but faulted him for occasional dullness and at times monotonous rhetoric. He noted that Van Doren was that rare biographer whose life was itself suitable for a biography from his childhood in the 19th century on a farm in Illinois to his life in the forefront of Manhattan’s intellectual world. The excerpts from Three Worlds, Moss wrote, were among the best parts of this book. On the other hand, Moss felt that the excerpts from Franklin, Van Doren’s best-known work, were a disappointment and his inclusion of the complete What is American Literature, a mistake since Moss thought it was not true literary criticism but little more than a catalogue of writers with a discussion of literary trends “as though they occurred in a vacuum.” {Van Doren was a noted scholar, critic writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet as well as a Columbia professor who had a profound influence on the many eminent people he taught. Known at first as the kid brother of already famous Carl Van Doren, by 1946 he was arguably the better known sibling, in part because he hosted a network radio show, “Invitation to Learning.” He was a giant in his day and the quintessential public intellectual. Unfortunately he is perhaps most remembered today, if at all, as the father of Charles Van Doren, who was caught up in the quiz show scandal.}
The Portable Walt Whitman . The Viking ads noted that this volume, also edited by Mark Van Doren, was the most complete one-volume edition of Whitman’s work available. Communist writer and critic Samuel Sillen had edited another collection, Walt Whitman, Poet of American Democracy, the year before. Harvard professor and critic F.O. Matthiessen, an expert on Whitman and his contemporaries, wrote that Van Doren focused on the literary side of Whitman’s writings while Sillen’s selections were meant to further political dogma. The reviewer said Van Doren’s choice of dealing with the poems in the various versions of Leaves of Grass chronologically rather than under the classifications Whitman had used provided a fresh way to look at these familiar works. Besides 95 poems from Leaves of Grass, Van Doren also included most of the prose passages in A Backward Glance, Specimen Days and Democratic Vistas. {Matthiessen was an eminent scholar in his own right. He became one of the more tragic victims of the postwar witchhunt. In his early twenties he had fallen in love with an older man, the painter Peter Cheyney. Their 20-year relationship was an open secret, known to friends and close associates, but not spoken about publicly. After Cheyney’s death in 1945, Matthiessen, who had suffered a previous nervous breakdown, fell into depression. Matters worsened when he was caught up in the postwar Witchhunt. Matthiessen was a Socialist who was more in the mold of the 19th century Utopian idealists he studied and wrote about than of the dogmatic Marxists under investigation. However he had agreed with some of the stands and causes of the radical left and had lent his name to a number of Popular Front organizations. This was enough for the House Un-American Activities Committee to launch an inquiry into his activities and personal life. He jumped to his death from a hotel window. He was 48.}
The Portable Poe was advertised as the most comprehensive one-volume edition of Poe’s works. Writer and historian Philip Van Doren Stern, who also edited a number of Pocket Book anthologies, was the editor. Novelist Hervey Allen (Anthony Adverse), who had written a biography of Poe in 1926, provided the generally laudatory review in The New York Times Book Review. {Stern was not a member of the famous Van Doren clan and is most remembered today as the author of the short story that became the film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which was starting production this week in 1946.}
The Portable Murder Book included 18 true crime stories from storytellers and journalists, including William Bolitho, Joseph Gollomb. Christopher Morley, Edmund Pearson, Dorothy Sayers and Alexander Woollcott. Joseph Henry Jackson, literary editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, was editor. Playwright Russel Crouse, represented on Broadway this week in 1946 by the record-breaking “Life with Father” and the soon-to-be Pulitzer Prize-winning State of the Union, reviewed the book for The Times in September 1945, declaring that “If you have an appetite for murder, this is unquestionably your dish, rich and red and full flavored...chosen with the taste of the true connoisseur.”
The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald. Dorothy Parker was editor and John O’Hara wrote the introduction. It included The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night and nine short stories. When this book came out in 1945, Fitzgerald had been dead for four years. According to Times daily reviewer Charles Poore, after the requisite laudatory eulogies were delivered, the critical establishment had divided between those who considered him the greatest of all American novelists and those who dismissed his writings as well-written but dated relics of the Jazz Age (which Poore stated that Fitzgerald had invented). Poore added that the one thing of which he was certain was that Fitzgerald’s writings would long outlive that of the critics who wrote about him. Poore was, however, disappointed that the “inevitable” Great Gatsby was included in this collection instead of This Side of Paradise, which he, like most critics of the day, felt was a far better novel. This Viking Portable helped establish Fitzgerald’s reputation as a writer whose works had lasting significance. While Fitzgerald had been a favorite of many critics and had small devoted fanbase, his books were critical sensations but not bestsellers when they first came out. More people had read the short stories he had published in mass market magazines, In 1939, the Modern Library had dropped its reissue of The Great Gatsby for lack of sales. The Bantam paperback edition of Gatsby released at the end of 1945 was also a flop.
The Portable Novels of Science. Editor Donald A. Wollheim, one of the major science-fiction writers and editors of the day, included The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells. Before the Dawn by John Taine, The Shadow Out of Time by H.P. Lovecraft and Odd John by Olaf Stapledon in this volume, credited as being the first hardcover anthology from a major publisher devoted to science fiction. Science-fiction only became a recognized publishing genre at the end of the 1940s according to a story that Wolheim wrote for The New York Times in 1949.
The Portable Oscar Wilde. The British writer and poet Richard Aldington was the editor. It included the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, the plays “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “Salome,” the essay “The Critic as Artist,” the poems “The Sphinx” and “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” portions of “De Profundis,” the letter he wrote from jail and snippets, epigrams and anecdotes. Princeton professor Carlos Baker wrote in The Times Book Review that he hoped that this volume would lead to Wilde being remembered in the future more as a writer than, as he was at that time, for the trial that brought him down.
In addition to the Portable Faulkner, The Portable Woollcott was published at the end of April. It included the text of two bestselling anthologies of his writings, While Rome Burns and Long, Long Ago, plus other sketches and anecdotes. John Mason Brown, the drama critic of The Saturday Review, was editor. Woollcott, who had been a drama critic at The Times, a New Yorker writer, a larger-than-life man-about-town. a famed Algonquin Round Table wit and a radio personality, had died in 1943. He was still the subject of much interest in 1946. A major Woollcott biography had been recently published and his books were being reissued in paperback format as well. In his Times review, Charles Poore wrote that Brown overstated Woollcott’s skill as a writer. In Poore’s estimation, Woollcott wrote “molasses-pudding prose,” more interesting for its subject matter, much of it gossipy accounts of famous people and events, than for his style. However other critics of his day considered Woollcott a master storyteller. Brown suspected that much of the general public had Woollcott confused with Monty Woolley, who had played Sheridan Whiteside, the blustering, acid-tongued character based on Woollcott, in the movie version of “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” Woollcott, who also acted on occasion, had taken a turn playing the character on stage. Poore concluded that “if the new postwar generation does take to reading ‘The Portable Woollcott,’ they will certainly get a strange picture of life in America during the last three or four decades. Still, come to think of it, life was pretty strange in those days, at that.” The postwar generation did not take to Woollcott in great number and his fame and reputation faded to the point where it is hard to realize today what a major figure he once was. He still has some readers, mostly because of his subject matter.
Viking Portables released later in 1946 were:
The Portable Irish Reader edited by Diarmuid Russell.
The Portable Mark Twain edited by Bernard De Voto.
The Portable Rabelais. edited by Samuel Putnam.
The Portable Thomas Wolfe edited by Maxwell Geismar.
The Portable Ring Lardner edited by Gilbert Seldes.
The Portable Emerson edited by Mark Van Doren.
The Portable Elizabethan Reader, edited by Hiram Haydn.
The Portable Blake edited by Alfred Kazin.
A paperback line of Viking Portables is still published today, including many of the above titles, but some in revised versions.