What are the best books to draw inspiration from if you are a writer? I would nominate in no particular order: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Other Poems, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and The Bible. The last three may make it appear as if I am cheating, but I think they have earned their rightful place on this list though they may be unconventional "books" in the strictest sense of the word.
Pride and Prejudice has been adapted to death for good reason. Every generation since Austen seemingly has its own. The most famous movie adaptations are of course the Keira Knightley movie and the loose adaptation that is Bridget Jones' Diary, starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. Why is the story so beloved? Is there something about the protagonists Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy that keeps audiences hooked and wanting more? Absolutely.
At the beginning, the characters evaluate each other based on outward appearances and their place in the stratified world of English society at that time. Mr. Darcy comes across as proud and haughty. Elizabeth doesn't think so highly of him upon first meeting him and in fact could be said to be prejudiced against him. Their relationship is cemented in an engagement when Mr. Darcy overcomes his pride and Elizabeth overcomes her prejudice and propensity to make snap judgments about people. They go off merrily into the sunset of literary heroes who live happily ever after. This is not the case for some of the other books on our list.
Beloved, by Toni Morrison, recounts the story of a runaway slave named Sethe who murders her eldest daughter and tries to murder her other children to prevent them from being enslaved. This novel is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, a Kentucky slave who escaped to the free state of Ohio where she killed one of her children and attempted to kill the others before being captured by the authorities.
A young woman named Beloved appears at Sethe's home, and Sethe believes this she is the daughter she killed some years prior as "Beloved" was the epitaph she placed on her daughter's tombstone. She was unable to afford to have "Dearly" inscribed before it. The novel centers on themes of family specifically mothers and daughters and the intergenerational pain and trauma caused by slavery. Women, as in all of Morrison's fiction, gird the novel's plot, a circumstance which serves to highlight Black women's place in Black society writ large in America. In Morrison's world, when you cut a Black woman, it is the entire family that bleeds.
Part of Beloved's legacy is that it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was turned into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey. The other part is that it forever bears testament to the "60 million and more" Africans who died as a direct result of the Atlantic slave trade. These are the people to whom the book is dedicated lest we ever forget them.
War and Peace, along with Anna Karenina, is thought of as Tolstoy's finest work. It chronicles the Napoleonic Wars' impact on Tsarist Russia as seen through the prism of five aristocratic families — the Drubetskoys, the Bolkonskys, the Bezukhovs, the Kuragins and the Rostovs. It is almost biblical in scope and is characterized by its expansive plot, historical accuracy and its beautifully drawn characters. Tolstoy resisted calling it a novel, poem or historical chronicle because according to him Russian literature resisted easy classification.
The book was published in 1869 in its final form but was first serialized in The Russian Messenger (Russkiy Vestnik) starting in 1865. Portions of it are in French because that was the language of the aristocracy at the time. An American film was released in 1956 starring the ever enchanting Audrey Hepburn as Natasha Rostova, Henry Fonda as Pierre Bezukhov and Mel Ferrer as Andrei Bolkonsky.
Tolstoy resisted the "great man" theory of history which postulates that history is the result of the actions of a few heroes. Instead he believed that thousands of individuals contributed to the making of significant historical events. This may be why War and Peace unfolds as it does with dozens of characters and real historical figures like Napoleon interspersed with one another. Why does War and Peace endure as a work of great world literature?
It's a literary classic because of its realistic portrayal of that apex of human misery — war, its sweeping portrait of romantic love and its rendering of the Russian people. A quote from the novel reads: "Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly." This is Tolstoy's final message to the reader.
Next up on the list is The Great Gatsby, the seminal portrait of a millionaire bootlegger in the nouveau riche environs of West Egg intent on reuniting with Daisy Buchanan, his former paramour. The 1925 Jazz Age novel has, like Pride and Prejudice, been the subject of umpteenth adaptations. The enduring meme and Baz Luhrmann directed-adaptation, however, features Leonardo DiCaprio. He is raising his glass in greeting to narrator Jay Carraway, played by Tobey Maguire, while introducing himself as Jay Gatsby.
Gatsby is notable for its depiction of the American Dream and the roaring 20s with its loose mores and speakeasies. Gatsby is described as having "one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life...It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."
Gatsby is one of the great heroes of American fiction. There is something deeply American about being nouveau riche and not of the old money class. Art, as they say, imitates life. Fitzgerald's lost love, Ginevra King was the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan. King was the wealthy socialite with whom Fitzgerald fell madly in love. She loved him back, but their union was thwarted by her father who warned him that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls". Fitzgerald eventually married Zelda Sayre who insisted upon him becoming wealthy before their nuptials. He met her demands after finding success as a writer of short stories and novels but never forgot Ginerva much like Gatsby could never forget Daisy.
The Waste Land and Other Poems is a collection of poetry that speaks to the malaise of the 20th century man. In addition to the titular poem, it contains "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock", "Portrait of a Lady" and twenty other seminal poems. This BBC recording of The Waste Land" read by the actor Jeremy Irons is not to be missed.
"The Waste Land" is divided into five parts: "The Burial of the Dead", "A Game of Chess", "The Fire Sermon", "Death by Water" and "What the Thunder Said". The first section starts with perhaps the most famous line of poetry in the Western canon: "April is the cruellest month". In the bleak world of the epic poem, the barren remnants of post World War I Europe are juxtaposed with the legend of the Fisher King who, suffering from an incurable injury, asks if he should at least set his lands in order in the poem's final stanza.
As a modernist masterpiece that references everything from the legend of King Arthur to Baudelaire, it is no coincidence that the poem makes mention of two of the other "books" on our list: The Bible and Shakespeare's oeuvre, specifically Coriolanus. Christianity plays a central role in the poem. The tarot card of the Hanged Man mentioned in "The Burial of the Dead" represents Jesus' crucifixion. The "burnished throne" referenced in "A Game of Chess" is an allusion to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. A "broken Coriolanus" is "revived" in "What the Thunder Said" referencing the Roman general who was initially heralded but later exiled.
"The Waste Land" takes the reader from a London with a polluted Thames to the Ganges. Eliot studied Eastern philosophy while at Harvard, and its influence shows up in his references to Buddhism and the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The poem ends with the same line said in every Upanishad: "Shantih shantih shantih" ("peace peace peace") a final note joining Eastern and Western religions.
It could be argued that no one person — man or woman — is held in as high regard in the canon of Western literature than William Shakespeare. His works have been endlessly adapted into every form of media known to man. My personal favorite Shakespearean adaptation is the 1993 film, Much Ado About Nothing, starring and directed by Kenneth Branagh. Beatrice and Benedict are among the most memorable couples in all of literary fiction. Then couple Emma Thompson and Branagh played them to great comedic effect, and the film was rounded out by a stellar cast including Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves, Kate Beckinsale, Robert Sean Leonard and Michael Keaton.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare is a book comprised of plays including Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra among others. The "Bard of Avon" was a playwright, poet and actor also known for his sonnets who lived from 1564 to 1616. In 1623, the First Folio was published. It was a definitive edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works including 36 of his plays.
Shakespeare was hailed as being "not of an age, but for all time" and time has proven this to be true. "To be or not to be" Hamlet asks himself. Those suicidal lines from Shakespeare's most famous hero ricochet across the ages. Other renowned quotations that have become part and parcel of the English-speaking world's vernacular are: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" from As You Like It, "If music be the food of love, play on" from Othello and "All that glitters is not gold" from The Merchant of Venice among many others. The only source that is quoted more is the next book on our list: The Bible.
The Bible, sometimes called The Holy Bible, is the single most influential book ever written. Pictured below is a still from The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston as Moses. The Bible is the most adapted work in the history of the world. It has spawned movies, plays, radio shows, books, television series and every kind of happening imaginable. Wikipedia describes it as an anthology "held to be sacred in Christianity, and partly in Judaism, Samaritanism, Islam, the Baháʼí Faith, and other Abrahamic religions."
The King James version of the Bible, once the most widely circulated, contains 80 books including the Old Testament, the New Testament and the books of Apocrypha. It was originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. The Bible is far and away the "best-selling" book of all time with an estimated 5 billion copies sold. The English word Bible itself is derived from the Hellenistic Greek word meaning "the books" so the Bible is quite literally the apotheosis of the written word. The Bible is the product of many authors and was originally handed down through oral tradition with the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible dating from circa 1200 BCE.
The stories in the Bible have had a profound impact on Western literature and thought. Some of the most notable heroes and heroines, if they can be called that, are Jesus, Mary and Joseph; the apostles of Jesus including Peter, Andrew, James son of Zebedee, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, James, son of Alphaeus, Judas, son of James, Simon the Zealot, Judas Iscariot (the traitor) and Matthias. The women of the Bible include Sarah, Leah, Rachel, Rebekah, Miriam, Esther, Ruth, several Marys, Elizabeth and Martha among others. The stories involving these men and women form the basis of the Western literary tradition. There is David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, Adam and Eve not to mention Pilate and Jesus. These are the stories we hear even before learning how to read them ourselves.
Famous quotes from the Bible include:
1. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. (Psalm 23:4)
2. In the beginning was the Word. (John 1:1)
3. Do to others as you would have them do to you. (Luke 6:31)
4. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (1 Corinthians 13:4-8)
5. Love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:39)
6. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13)
7. God is love. (1 John 4:8)
8. Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen. (Matthew 6:9-13)
9. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)
10. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. (Exodus 20:8)
Regardless of one's religious persuasion, these words have the sparkle of wisdom.
The Bible and the other books on this list will endure for as long as there are people to read them. They are a tapestry of complex tales with even more complex human beings at their center. These people are to be at times admired, at times reviled but they are never to be forgotten.
