Harvard Press Gains First Bestseller

Scores of professors and academics has not been able to pull the trick.

Instead it took the efforts of one of American greatest writers--Eudora Welty--to catapult a Harvard University Press publication to the New York Times bestseller list.

The Times ranked Welty's One Writer's Beginnings as the nation's 14th most popular book on Sunday. The ranking was determined by sales volume in bookstores across the country.

One Writer's Beginnings is Welty's auto biographical account of her childhood and the years leading up to the publication of her first story. The book is based on material from the author's three presentations as speaker in the first annual William E. Massey lecture series at Harvard last April.

"Sales are booming," Gary Lawton, sales manager for the University Press, said this week. Forty thousand copies of the book have been sold since it was released February 20. The fifth printing is now in progress and will bring the total number of copies in print to 70,000. Lawton added. He estimated that 100,000 copies will eventually be sold.

We did expect the book to do well but a place on the New York Times bestseller list was a bit of a jolt for us," said Joyce Backman '56, Welty's editor at the University Press "Each pace is a vignette, wonderfully styled and shaped," she added.

Lawton attributed the book's popularity to Welty's large following and to the favorable reviews the book has received.

The 71 year old University Press publishes about 120 titles a year including about 40 percent by scholars affiliated with Harvard A title published by the Press sells on average about 2500 copies.

Though Welty could not be reached for comment, her agent. Timothy Seldes, said yesterday that she is "absolutely enchanted with her book's success."

He added that though she had enjoyed the two years she had spent working on the Massey lectures and the book, she was eager to return to writing fiction.

Welty is one of the most widely acclaimed American fiction writers of the century. She has published 13 novels and collections, and one. The Optimist's Daughter, won a Pulitzer Price in 1973.

David H. Donald. Warren Professor of American History, described Welty as "an American Jane Austen, clearly one of our very best 20th century writers."

According to the Times. One Writer's Beginnings is the second of Welty's books to achieve bestseller status. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, published in 1980, appeared on the. Times bestseller list for six weeks in 1981.

The Massey lecture series features a speaker from a different area of American culture each year.

Much of One Writer's Beginnings was material that had been presented in the lectures, according to Backman, but Welty revised the text "substantially" for the book.