A River Of Chicken Soup

By ANDREW FERGUSON

As far as inspirational stories go, this one is pretty good. Once upon a time--1989, to be exact--a pair of aspiring authors compiled a book of their favorite inspirational tales and poems. They grouped them according to topic and chose a catchy title. Then they hired a professional book agent to help them get their dream between hard covers. One major publisher after another turned them down cold, and after the 33rd rejection, their agent quit. Face it, they were told: "Parables don't sell." And that title! "Too nicey-nice." But the plucky authors soldiered on. Finally, in 1993, a small publishing house in Florida agreed to put out the book. "We think you can sell 20,000 copies," the publishers said.

Seven million copies later, the authors are living happily ever after. Chicken Soup for the Soul: 101 Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit, by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, hit the top of the best-seller lists in 1995 and spawned a series of sequels--Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul, for the Pet-Lover's Soul, for the Teenage Soul, for the Soul at Work, ad nauseam--that together have sold more than an astounding 28 million copies. (Suggestion for a new title: Chicken Soup for the Souls of 33 Publishers Who Really, Really Screwed Up.) The Chicken Soup product line is the publishing phenomenon of the decade. Last week five of the Top 10 slots on the Publishers Weekly paperback best-seller list were filled by Chicken Soup titles. Hansen and Canfield say they plan at least 30 more books over the next few years, and perhaps as many as 70, including ones for the prisoner's soul, the ocean lover's soul and the country soul. Nicey-nice sells.

"Our books go heart to heart, soul to soul, to the core being of a person," says Hansen. Each contains 101 stories ("That's a spiritual number," he says), and few of those last longer than three pages--perfect for attention spans ground down to nothing by TV. No one will mistake Chicken Soup for literature, and in case you miss the point, the cover blurb from Robin ("Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous") Leach is a clue that you're not buying Middlemarch. From book to book, the tone is unvarying: earnest, unadorned and ruthlessly uplifting. The stories are gathered under recurring rubrics--"On Love," "A Matter of Attitude," "Live Your Dream," "Learning to Love Yourself"--and deal with such universal themes as a mother's love, obstacles overcome, misunderstandings resolved, the cuteness of puppies and the boundless wisdom of children. The cumulative effect is overwhelming. Imagine a bath in strawberry shortcake. Imagine a meal of chocolate eclairs. With a Napoleon for dessert. And a milk-shake chaser.

How to account for the stunning success of books that are--alas--little more than greeting cards teased out to 300 pages? "Our stories are so little, so bite-sized, that they don't intimidate people," says Hansen. "People can read them in the bathroom. They reignite the spirit." Most of those readers reigniting themselves in the bathroom are women, who, according to sales research, purchase 85% to 90% of the Chicken Soup books. But deep thinkers would be wrong to see in the series' success yet another symptom of that much analyzed trend, the feminization of American culture. Both Hansen, 50, and Canfield, 53, perfected their storytelling art on the country's vast motivational-speaking circuit, before audiences of supposedly hardened businessmen, who nowadays are taught to share feelings, break down emotional barriers and awaken their Inner Capitalists. Chicken Soup is less the product of the feminization of American culture than of the infantilization of corporate America.

"Chicken Soup for the Soul came about because someone in a seminar said to me one day, 'You know that story about that dog that you told? Is that in a book somewhere?'" Canfield recalls. "After hearing this month after month, I finally went, 'Someone's trying to tell me to put these stories in a book.' It became a divine obsession."

Canfield had earlier met Hansen at--where else?--a holistic-health conference in California, and they decided to pool their stories for what became the original Chicken Soup. Today they receive unsolicited submissions at the rate of a hundred a day. These are culled by a group of staff readers, and then Canfield and Hansen, along with a team of co-authors, make the final cut down to the mystical 101.

Give credit where it's due: Canfield and Hansen's brain candy suits the temper of the times. "We put together a book of stories that gives you an uplifting story without any moralizing at the end," says Canfield. "The books are based on spiritual principles but not religious [ones]." Uplift without morals, spirituality without religion--it's the perfect faith for the postmodern '90s. And chicken soup is as good a name for it as any.

--Reported by Deborah Edler Brown/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Deborah Edler Brown/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs/New York