The View from Pompey's Head
Channel: all the knowledge of the universe PRINCIPIA
Date: 2022-01-20

The View from Pompey's Head, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10104450 / CC BY SA 3.0

#1954_American_novels
#American_mystery_novels
#American_novels_adapted_into_films
#Doubleday_(publisher)_books
The View from Pompey's Head is a novel by American writer Hamilton Basso, first published by Doubleday in 1954.
It spent 40 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.
The title refers to the book's setting, the fictional small town of Pompey's Head, South Carolina.
The book was reprinted by the Louisiana State University Press in 1998 as part of its "Voices of the South" series.
Both The View from Pompey's Head and its prequel, The Light Infantry Ball （1960）, were finalists for the National Book Award for Fiction.
The book was reviewed positively in 1954 by The New York Times: "Zestful and non-escapist entertainment... The most pleasantly and sensibly romantic novel to come my way in a long time." and by the Saturday Review: "His most impressive book to date. A long, mildly ironic, and deliberately discursive work, it weaves two of his favorite subjects, the subtle social distinctions of a small Southern city and the subtle questions of reputation and standing in New York literary and publishing circles." Inez Hollander Lake, in her biography of Basso, wrote "Comfortably placed on The New York Times bestseller list for 40 weeks, selling more than 75,000 copies, and sold to the movies for $100,000, The View from Pompey's Head was the breakthrough that Basso had been
waiting for. However, just as one cannot argue that Melville's Typee （1846） was a better book because it sold more copies than Moby-Dick （1851）, so it is equally impossible to claim that The View from Pompey's Head was a masterpiece because it was so popular." James Sallis, writing in The Boston Globe, commented: "What it did was gather up, like a self-anthology, themes and preoccupations from Basso's earlier work: the return-of-the-native motif so important to at least three previous novels,...