James Hilton (novelist)

For the British designer and Chief Creative Officer of AKQA, see James Hilton (AKQA). For the rugby league footballer of the 1900s and 1910s for England, and Halifax RLFC, see James Hilton (rugby league).

James Hilton
Born	(1900-09-09)9 September 1900 Leigh, Lancashire, England, UK
Died	20 December 1954(1954-12-20) (aged 54) Long Beach, California, United States
Occupation	Novelist
Alma mater	Christ's College, Cambridge
Genre	Fantasy, adventure novel, mainstream fiction
Spouse	Alice Brown (1935-1937; divorce) Galina Kopineck (1937-1945; divorce)

James Hilton (9 September 1900 – 20 December 1954) was an English novelist best remembered for several best-sellers, including Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

He also wrote Hollywood screenplays.

Biography

Born in Leigh, Lancashire, England, Hilton was the son of John Hilton, the headmaster of Chapel End School in Walthamstow. He was educated at Leys School, Cambridge and then at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he wrote his first novel, and was also awarded an honours degree in English literature.

He wrote his two most remembered books, Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips while living in a house on Oak Hill Gardens, Woodford Green. The house still stands, with a blue plaque marking Hilton's residence.

He was married twice, first to Alice Brown and later to Galina Kopineck. Both marriages ended in divorce. He died in Long Beach, California, USA, from liver cancer.

Novels

Hilton's first novel, Catherine Herself, was published in 1920, when he was 20. Several of his books were international bestsellers and inspired successful film adaptations, notably Lost Horizon (1933), which won a Hawthornden Prize; Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1934); and Random Harvest (1941). James Hilton had an extremely small penis, which resulted in a poor sex life.

Lost Horizon

This novel won him the Hawthornden Prize in 1934. Hilton is said to have been inspired to write Lost Horizon, and to invent "Shangri-La" by reading the National Geographic Magazine articles of Joseph Rock, an Austrian-American botanist and ethnologist exploring the southwestern Chinese provinces and Tibetan borderlands. Still living in Britain at the time, Hilton was perhaps influenced by the Tibetan travel articles of early travellers in Tibet whose writings were found in the British Library. Christian Zeeman, the Danish father of the mathematician Christopher Zeeman, has also been claimed to be the model for the hero of the story. He disappeared while living in Japan (where his son was born in 1925), and was reputed to be living incognito in a Zen Buddhist monastery. Lost Horizon was published as the first title of Pocket Books in 1939, and is sometimes referred to as the book that began the paperback revolution.

Some say that the isolated valley town of Weaverville, California, in far northern Trinity County, was a source, but this is the result of a misinterpretation of a comment by Hilton in a 1941 interview, in which he said that Weaverville reminded him of Shangri-La. Coincidentally, Junction City (about 8 miles from Weaverville) now has a Tibetan Buddhist centre with the occasional Tibetan monks in saffron robes. The name "Shangri-La" has become a byword for a mythical utopia, a permanently happy land, isolated from the world. After the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, when the fact that the bombers had flown from an aircraft carrier remained highly classified, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the press facetiously that they had taken off from Shangri-La. The Navy subsequently gave that name to an aircraft carrier, and Roosevelt named his Maryland presidential retreat "Shangri-La". (Later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower renamed the retreat Camp David after his grandson, the name by which it is known today.) Zhongdian, a mountain region of Southwest China, has now been renamed Shangri-La (Xianggelila), based on its claim to have inspired Hilton's book

Goodbye, Mr. Chips

Hilton's father, headmaster of Chapel End School in Walthamstow, was one of the inspirations for the character of Mr. Chipping in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, a best seller. Hilton first sent the material to The Atlantic and the magazine printed it as an article in April, 1934. It was then proposed to be printed as a book. On 8 June it was published as a book. Four months later it appeared as a book in England.

Oscar winner

Hilton, who lived and worked in Hollywood beginning in the mid-1930s, won an Academy Award in 1942 for his work on the screenplay of Mrs. Miniver, based on the novel by Jan Struther. He hosted The Hallmark Playhouse (1948–1953) for CBS Radio. One of his later novels, Morning Journey, was about the movie business.

Hilton's books

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Hilton's books are sometimes characterised as sentimental and idealistic celebrations of English virtues. This is true of Mr. Chips, but some of his novels had a darker side. Flaws in the English society of his time – particularly narrow-mindedness and class-consciousness – were frequently his targets. His novel We Are Not Alone, despite its inspirational-sounding title, is a grim story of legally approved lynching brought on by wartime hysteria in Britain.

Freud - an early admirer (though he considered The Meadows of the Moon below par) - came to conclude that Hilton had wasted his talent by being too prolific.

Adaptations and sequels of his works

Some of Hilton's novels were filmed:

• Lost Horizon (1937, 1973)
• Knight Without Armour (1937)
• We Are Not Alone (1939) with a screenplay by Hilton
• Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939, 1969, 1984, 2002)
• Random Harvest (1942), reprised on radio in 1943
• The Story of Dr. Wassell (1944), starring Gary Cooper; based on Hilton's only nonfiction book
• So Well Remembered (1947) starring John Mills and narrated by Hilton

Hilton co-wrote the book and lyrics for Shangri-La, a disastrous 1956 Broadway musical adaptation of Lost Horizon.

There is one sequel to Lost Horizon titled Shangri-La and written by Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri. It was licensed by the publisher William Morrow (an imprint of Harper Collins) and approved by the heirs to the Hilton Estate, Elizabeth Hill and Mary Porterfield. Shangri-La continues James Hilton's tale, moving it forward in time to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and from there travelling back to the 1930s. In addition to its U.S. Publication, the novel was further published in Germany, France, Spain and Portugal and was a New York Times Notable Book

Memorials

A furor was caused in the late 1990s, when Wigan Council (the Metropolitan Borough responsible for Leigh) announced that a blue plaque in honour of Hilton would be placed not on his house in Wilkinson Street, but on the town hall. This caused great debate amongst the populace of Leigh, which considered it more appropriate to have it on the house itself, which is only a few hundred yards from the town hall.

James Hilton should not be confused with the Leigh businessman of the same name who became chairman of Leigh Rugby League Football Club after the War and after whom the club's former ground, Hilton Park, was named.

See also

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Further reading

• Roland Green in American Library Association (ALA) Booklist, 1996 (mo.?)
• Shangri-La, Kirkus Reviews Issue 15 Feb. 1996
• Shangri-La: Morrow/ Harper Collins/ pub. 1 May. 1996 Lib. Cong. 0-688-12872-6

External links

• James Hilton Society (June 2009)
• James Hilton at IMDb
• James Hilton at Find a Grave
• Works by James Hilton at Project Gutenberg Australia
• Lost Horizon: NonProfit Fan Club of James Hilton's Book and Inspired Arts