The talk-show maven's Book Club spawned literary stars and controversy.
 The Launch: Jacquelyn Mitchard's "The Deep End of the Ocean" was the first book Oprah Winfrey chose for her club in 1996. (Steve Green) |
By Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
May 22, 2011
For some, a book club means Chardonnay, gossip and some bookish conversation. For Oprah Winfrey, it's meant making bestsellers and, as she said Monday, "the biggest controversy in our 25 years."
As her broadcast television show comes to a close, Winfrey welcomed the reason for that controversy — the not-truthful memoirist James Frey — onto two full shows of her final 10, putting her once-vital Book Club back at the center of the national discussion.
Oprah's Book Club launched quietly in 1996, and a nod soon became a sure shot to the bestseller list and a windfall for publishing as a whole.
"It's the ultimate book club; it's very broad and very deep," Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of the prestigious publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said in a telephone interview. "It's been a wonderful enhancement to publishing fiction."
In the club's heyday, Winfrey selected about 10 books a year — she's remembered for choosing family-focused novels but was equally supportive of challenging literary fiction. She would announce the much-anticipated next book on the air, give viewers a few months to buy and read it, then have the author appear on her show in a book-club-discussion setting.
No one in publishing had expected Winfrey's impact on their industry's bottom line after the media maven energized an enthusiastic and dedicated group of readers.
L.A.-based author Janet Fitch was a virtual unknown when her book "White Oleander" was selected for Winfrey's club in 1999; the selection helped sell 720,000 copies before the author even appeared on the show.
"I'd spent basically 20 years just living a writer's life," Fitch said recently in Los Angeles. She'd never considered that her book, which features a difficult mother and a daughter left to the foster-care system, might find a wide readership. "Oprah said it would go over a million by the time it was all over, and it was true."
Hollywood also jumped to attention — film rights to Fitch's novel were sold on the sidewalk outside of Book Soup in West Hollywood, and Michelle Pfeiffer starred in the movie version. Other books that made it to screen after being selected by Winfrey include Andre Dubus III's "The House of Sand and Fog," Jane Hamilton's "A Map of the World" and Bernhard Schlink's "The Reader."
Read Kellogg's full story about the biggest of all book clubs at the LA Times.
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