Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club 1
A Dialectic With the Everyday:
Communication and Cultural Politics on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club
The Oprah Book Club did something extraordinary. I don’t think there’s been
anything ever like it. When a beloved television personality persuades, convinces,
cajoles, hundreds of thousands of people to read books, it’s not just a revolution, it’s
an upheaval.
– Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize winning author,
also selected for Oprah’s Book Club
1
Come on, people; Oprah isn’t a literary critic, or a family therapist, or a priest. She’s
a talk-show host. Some perspective here, please.
– Abby Fowler, letter to the editor, Newsweek, November 19, 2001
2
When Oprah Winfrey announced on the September 17, 1996 installment of The Oprah
Winfrey Show that she “want[ed] to get the whole country reading again,” (Oprah’s book club
anniversary party, 1997, p. 1), few likely would have predicted the daytime television talk-show
personality’s extraordinary bearing upon bibliographic taste and judgment in the U.S. Yet her first
selection for the newly-formed Oprah’s Book Club, Jacquelyn Mitchard’s hitherto modestly
successful novel The Deep End of the Ocean, proceeded to sell more than 700,000 copies and shot to
number one on the New York Times bestseller list following Winfrey’s announcement. Audiences’
sudden, intensive interest in the book, and by extension the Book Club, prompted the Washington
Post less than two weeks later to profile the latter in a cover story (Streitfeld, 1996, p. 1A). The
significance of the Post’s coverage was not lost on Winfrey, who noted that the Book Club enjoyed
“an even bigger start than Watergate” in its pages (Newborn quintuplets come home, 1996, p. 15).
Over the next six years, all forty-eight Oprah’s Book Club selections followed a similar pattern of
success. Each typically sold between one-half million and one million copies or more over and above
those sold prior to Winfrey’s choosing it (Gray, 1996, p. 84; Touched by an Oprah, 1999, p. 113;
Ticker, 2000, p. 84). She even was awarded a gold medal at the 1999 National Book Awards, the
“Oscars” of the book industry, to recognize the Book Club’s ability to stimulate interest in and
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Convention