The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 1966 The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 1966 This is a list of adult fiction books that topped "The New York Times" Fiction Best Seller list in 1966. Only three novels topped the list that year, which was dominated by Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls" which spent 28 weeks at the top of the list and 65 weeks in the top 10. "Valley" was toppled by Robert Crichton's "The Secret of Santa Vittoria", a World War II story based on fact, which sold more than 100,000 copies in the first month of its release. It spent 18 weeks
Naked Came the Stranger year, further spurring the book's popularity. Mike McGrady was convinced that popular American literary culture had become so base—with the best-seller lists dominated by the likes of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann—that any book could succeed if enough sex was thrown in. To test his theory, in 1966 McGrady recruited a team of "Newsday" colleagues (according to Andreas Schroder, nineteen men and five women) to collaborate on a sexually explicit novel with no literary or social value whatsoever. McGrady co-edited the project with his "Newsday" colleague Harvey Aronson, and among the other collaborators were well-known writers including 1965 Pulitzer Prize