Marjorie Morningstar was published by Doubleday in 1955 and was the bestselling novel of that year, outselling everything else on the list and becoming a cultural phenomenon. Marjorie Morgenstern — who renames herself Morningstar — is a beautiful, intelligent girl from a prosperous Jewish family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who dreams of becoming an actress and falls in love with Noel Airman, a charming, intellectual theatrical director at a Catskills summer resort.
The novel’s six hundred pages trace Marjorie from seventeen to thirty-five: her college years, her apprenticeship in theater, her passionate and ultimately doomed relationship with Noel (who is brilliant but commitment-phobic, talented but self-destructive), and her gradual realization that the life she imagined for herself — artistic, bohemian, extraordinary — is not the life she will actually live. In the novel’s controversial final section, Marjorie marries a lawyer named Milton Schwartz and becomes a suburban housewife.
The ending ignited furious debate: was Wouk saying that women’s artistic ambitions are foolish? That Jewish women should settle for conventional lives? That the American Dream of self-invention always ends in conformity? Feminists attacked the novel for decades; traditional readers celebrated it. Wouk himself insisted that Marjorie’s choice was neither defeat nor triumph but simply the human reality that most lives are ordinary, and that ordinary life has its own dignity. The novel remains a fascinating document of mid-century American Jewish life and of the social pressures that shaped women’s choices in the 1950s.
Collecting Marjorie Morningstar
First edition (Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1955): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Without jacket: $5–$15
- Signed copies: $100–$300