List of The New York Times number-one books of 1949

This is a list of books that topped The New York Times best-seller list in 1949.

Fiction

The following list ranks the number-one best-selling fiction books.

Only four novels topped the list that year, which was dominated by John P. Marquand's Point of No Return which spent 22 straight weeks at the top of the list though it only lasted 34 weeks in the top 15 overall. Marquand's book is notable for its lampooning of W. Lloyd Warner, an anthropologist with whom Marquand had a personal grudge. ^[1] Point of No Return was toppled by John O'Hara's Rage To Live, which spent 6 weeks at the top. That book stayed in the top five for another 20 weeks but the remainder of the year was dominated by The Egyptian by the Finnish author Mika Waltari. ^[2] The Egyptian was translated from a Swedish translation by Naomi Walford. ^[3]

Date	Book	Author
January 3	The Big Fisherman	Lloyd Douglas
January 10
January 17
January 24
January 31
February 7
February 14
February 21
February 28
March 6
March 13
March 20
March 27
April 3
April 10	Point of No Return	John P. Marquand
April 17
April 24
May 1
May 8
May 15
May 22
May 29
June 5
June 12
June 19
June 26
July 3
July 10
July 17
July 24
July 31
August 7
August 14
August 21
August 28
September 4
September 11
September 18	A Rage To Live	John O'Hara
September 25
October 2
October 9
October 16
October 23
October 30	The Egyptian	Mika Waltari
November 6
November 13
November 20
November 27
December 4
December 11
December 18
December 26

Nonfiction

The following list ranks the number-one best-selling nonfiction books.

See also

• Publishers Weekly list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 1940s

References

1. Gordon Milne (1977), The Sense of Society: A History of the American Novel of Manners , Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, pp.183-184
2. John Bear, The #1 New York Times Best Seller: intriguing facts about the 484 books that have been #1 New York Times bestsellers since the first list, 50 years ago, Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1992, pp. 39-43
3. Ann-Marie Vinde (2004), "A Translator's Look at 'Flowering Nettle', Harry Martinson's 'Nässlorna blomma' Archived 2018-05-07 at the Wayback Machine , Swedish Book Review, vol. 1