“Abe would have liked this book,” the Fox News television host Bill O’Reilly said confidently of his blockbuster best-seller “Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever.” Even the ending?
Robert Wright for The New York Times
Bill O’Reilly is the co-author of “Killing Kennedy” (No. 1) and “Killing Lincoln” (No. 2).
Mr. O’Reilly reasoned that Lincoln would have liked this fast-paced, thrillerlike retelling of his death “because it is simple and he was a really simple guy, straightforward guy. He didn’t like a lot of subterfuge or a lot of nonsense.”
“I don’t know if Kennedy would have liked the book,” he added with a tad of reflection about “Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot,” his other history book written with Martin Dugard that is currently dominating the nonfiction best-seller lists, “because it really lays him out as far as what he did, and some of it wasn’t very nice. But in the end he comes off as fairly heroic.”
No one could accuse Mr. O’Reilly, 63, of playing down his own appeal — and perhaps justifiably so. He anchors the highest-rated news program on cable, his political and personal writings like “A Bold, Fresh Piece of Humanity” (2008) and “Pinheads and Patriots” (2010) have been huge sellers, and now, in his latest franchise, he has become arguably the most popular history author in America.
In the 65 weeks since “Killing Lincoln” was released in fall 2011, Mr. O’Reilly has owned territory near the top of The New York Times’s best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction. It would have been an extraordinary run by itself, but in October he released “Killing Kennedy,” which has since sold about one million copies.
For the last full week of the year he snagged both the No. 1 and 2 spots on the list, a rare feat.
But few authors manage more than one book on the hardcover list because even regulars like the historian David McCullough and the journalist Michael Lewis do not grind it out at the pace of Mr. O’Reilly, who has produced about a book a year over the past decade and intends to keep going. Others have had two atop the paperback nonfiction best-seller list, an act most recently accomplished by President Obama, whose two memoirs “Dreams From My Father” (1995) and “The Audacity of Hope” (2006) both spiked with his election in 2008.
Of course few authors also have the television platform Mr. O’Reilly has and which he uses for 30 seconds nightly to promote his books to his nearly three million viewers.
In person Mr. O’Reilly sheds his on-air bellicosity but maintains the forward energy of a barreling freight train. During an interview, held at his corner office at Fox headquarters in Manhattan, Mr. O’Reilly barely looked up as he autographed a pile of bookplates to be put into copies to be sold on his Web site for a premium for charity. He is determined, he explained, to take advantage of the holiday season.
Thirty minutes later he pointed to the pile completed and said: “That’s about 10 grand for charity right in that pile. Not bad.” That money, he said, is likely to go to the Coalition for the Homeless, a New York-based group that has successfully sued the city and won a court-ordered “right to shelter” — just the kind of policy initiative that Mr. O’Reilly and might gleefully label “radical” or “leftist” on his program.
But Mr. O’Reilly appears to relish not playing to type. Both on and over his desk, for example, are pictures of him and his daughter standing cozily with President and Mrs. Obama. “Michelle was very nice to my daughter,” he said.
Not being predictable is how he turned to history, he said. He was urged by publishers to do another memoir. It was an idea he dismissed “because I was repeating myself.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 24, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated the title of President Obama’s first memoir. It is “Dreams From My Father,” not “Dreams of Our Fathers.”
Bill O’Reilly Has Top 2 Spots on Hardcover Best-Seller List
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Bill O’Reilly Has Top 2 Spots on Hardcover Best-Seller List
