In the 1930s the Chicago retailer, Montgomery Ward, gave away children’s Christmas-themed coloring books each year as a promotion. By 1939, after the Depression ended, the department store decided to save money and publish a coloring book in-house.
Robert L May, a 34-year-old copywriter and aspiring writer who had entertained his boss at Montgomery Ward with his limericks, was given the task of writing the story. Inspiration came when Mr. May looked out his office window and the view of Lake Michigan was blocked by dense fog.
May’s story Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer used the theme of a unique trait interpreted as negative which ends up saving the day which was common in the 1930s and 40s popular culture.
May produced Rudolph, “the rollinckingest, rip-roaringest, riot-provokingest, Christmas give-away your town has ever seen!… A laugh and a thrill for every boy and girl in your town (and for their parents, too!)”
May considered other names for his leading character including Rodney, Rollo, Reginald, and Romeo (can you imagine Rodney the Red-Nosed Reindeer?), but eventually settled on Rudolph.
Months into the project, May’s wife died from cancer, and he became a widower and a single father. His boss offered to reassign the reindeer project. May refused. “I needed Rudolph now more than ever,” he later wrote.
A colleague in the art department drew sketches of Rudolph and together they convinced the boss to use the story. The book was an instant hit. Montgomery Ward’s printed and distributed more than 2 million copies that year at branches across the country. By comparison, only 430,000 copies of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a bestseller also published in 1939, were printed in its first year. The next year, Montgomery Ward began selling Rudolph-themed items.
While Rudolph was hitting it big, things grew worse for May. May spent years buried in debt from his wife’s medical bills while living on a copywriter’s salary. After World War II, Montgomery Ward’s then-CEO Sewell Avery, for reasons that aren’t exactly clear, gave May the rights to Rudolph.
Later, May’s brother-in-law wrote a song to accompany the book, which Gene Autry recorded in 1949. It remains the second-best selling Christmas song of all time. May, who had been barely scraping by on his copywriter’s salary became a millionaire. The May family estate continues to receive royalties to this day.