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.

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]

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

This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (April 2023)

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