Ernest Hemingway has some I already know about. For Whom The Bell Tolls is taken directly from a John Donne poem which is described in this Wikipedia article on the book. And The Sun Also Rises is from the Bible.
There may be another source beyond The Battle Hymn of the Republic for Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, but at least there’s another that borrows from the “literature” of a song.
Many book titles have the feel of something borrowed or slightly reworded.
How many can you think of that you know where the title is taken from?
Christy Brown’s autobiography My Left Foot (later a Daniel Day Lewis film) references a line from Shakespeare, if I am not mistaken. (Romeo and Juliet, maybe?)
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury references Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
I may be mistaken about My Left Foot. I just did a search of Shakespeare and couldn’t find the phrase. I could have sworn I heard it pop up in a Shakespeare play. Maybe it was in something else.
To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is a hilarious time travel novel by Connie Willis and the first Hugo winner to be intentionally funny, riffs off Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog by Jerome K. Jerome, also a hilarious book.
Good ones, spoke-. Here are some titles that may or may not be borrowings, but they surely do have that feel:
As I Lay Dying
East of Eden (from Genesis if I remember right: “and Adam went and dwelt…”)
The Halls of Montezuma (was this ever a book title? I know it’s a movie and was taken from The Marine’s Hymn)
All Quiet On The Western Front
It won’t bother me if movie titles are included – especially if their source is some other work of literature – whether or not they came from a book title per se.
Gone with the Wind was taken from a poem - I want to say Whitman, but I could be wrong.
Most of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books and Nursery Crime series take their titles from all kinds of literary sources - The Eyre Affair, Something Rotten, The Big Overeasy (Humpty Dumpty), etc.
This reminds of James Patterson’s books featuring Alex Cross, many of which have become movies, and most of which are from nursery rhymes, which I guess fall under the umbrella of “literature”:
Kiss the Girls
Along Came A Spider
Pop Goes the Weasel
When the Wind Blows
See How They Run
*…But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!.. *
**Goldilocks
Rumpelstiltskin
Beauty And The Beast
Jack And The Beanstalk
Snow White And Rose Red
Cinderella
Puss In Boots
The House That Jack Built
Three Blind Mice
Mary, Mary
There Was A Little Girl
Gladly The Cross-Eyed Bear
The Last Best Hope **
Stephen King’s The Dark Tower comes from Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, which is itself a literary allusion to a very old English fairy tale that was referenced in King Lear.
At the round earth’s imagined corners
blow your trumpets, angels
and arise from death
you numberless infinities of souls
and to your scattered bodies go!
One of many titles borrowed from Donne’s work, judging by this thread. He was quite a phrasemaker.
Patrick Neilsen Haden once said that when an author is stuck for a title, he can always take something from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” World Enough and Time has been used several times, most notably by Robert Penn Warren. Ursula K. Leguin used the phrase “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” from it for a short story, a Peter S. Beagle and Ellery Queen used A Fine and Private Place.
James Tiptree, Jr. used “And I Awake to Find Me Here on the Cold Hill Side” as a title from Keats “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”
Asimov’s The Gods Themselves comes from a quote from Schiller: “Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain.” The books three sections are titled for the three parts of the quote.
Charles Sheffield’s “Georgia on My Mind” is named after the song.