Book Titles that reference other Literature

[Annie-Xmas]

Mary Higgins Clark wrote four Christmas mysteries (two with daughter Carol) called:

Silent Night
All Throught the Night
Deck The Halls
He Sees You When You’re Sleeping

[ErinPuff]

Stephen Fry’s autobiography is called Moab is my Washpot, which is a line from one of the Psalms (actually, Google tells me it’s in both 60 and 108).

[Zeldar]

@ErinPuff

Stephen Fry’s autobiography is called Moab is my Washpot, which is a line from one of the Psalms (actually, Google tells me it’s in both 60 and 108).

Amazing and amusing. Reminds me of the days when I and smoking buddies would say “the world is my ashtray.”

[Khadaji]

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon references Sherlock Holmes.

[Quercus]

Patrick O’Brian’s *The Wine-Dark Sea *(part of the Master and Commander series) takes its title from Homer (or an English translation therof).

[Spoke]

Lord of the Flies is a Biblical reference, being a literal translation of the name Beelzebub (a god of the Philistines), also later used as another name for Satan.

[RealityChuck]

James Heriot’s stories of his life as a vet were marketed in the US using lines from an English Hymn, the titles taken from the lyrics:

All Things Bright and Beautiful
All Creatures Great and Small
All Things Wise and Wonderful (as the lines appear in the song; the books were issued in a different order).

[Mrs.Millamant]

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart takes its title from Yeats’s “The Second Coming.”

[jayjay]

@RealityChuck

James Heriot’s stories of his life as a vet were marketed in the US using lines from an English Hymn, the titles taken from the lyrics:

All Things Bright and Beautiful
All Creatures Great and Small
All Things Wise and Wonderful (as the lines appear in the song; the books were issued in a different order).

There was also a 4th book, The Lord God Made Them All.

[MEBuckner]

@Zeldar

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.

The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” presumably got the image (if not the exact words) from the Book of Revelation:

The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath.

And Revelation in turn seems to have been referring back to the 63rd chapter of Isaiah:

I have trodden the winepress alone;
from the nations no one was with me.
I trampled them in my anger
and trod them down in my wrath;
their blood spattered my garments,
and I stained all my clothing.

[Spoke]

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night comes from the Keats poem Ode to a Nightingale:

…Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways…

[MEBuckner]

Oh, and All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren is from “Humpty-Dumpty”.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Later, the book and subsequent movie All the President’s Men, about Watergate, also alluded to the old nursery rhyme.

[Ragiel]

@Katriona

Gone with the Wind was taken from a poem - I want to say Whitman, but I could be wrong.
…

Ernest Dowson, Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

Dowson also graced us with Days of Wine and Roses

[Zeldar]

An instance of a movie title coming from a poem is Splendor in the Grass.

[Julius_Henry]

Mark Harris’ **Bang the Drum Slowly ** takes it’s title from the western folk song that’s used in the novel.

[pinkfreud]

The title of William Styron’s Darkness Visible comes from Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Darkness Visible is about Styron’s battle with depression, and the quote from “Paradise Lost,” which is a description of hell, is quite appropriate:

A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end…

[Ragiel]

Robert Penn Warren’s novel World Enough and Time echoes the poem To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell.

[astorian]

Just from Shakespeare alone, I get…

1. Stephen AMbrose’s “Band of Brothers”
2. Frederick Forsyth’s “The Dogs of War”
3. Anthony Burgess’ “Nothing Like the Sun”
4. Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” (from Macbeth’s soliloquy on life: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
5. John Steinbeck’s “Winter of Our Discontent”
6. Alistair McLean’s “Where Eagles Dare”

For that matter, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels often have literary titles.

1. “A Catskill Eagle” is from a passage in Melville’s “Moby Dick.”
2. “Pale Kings and Princes” comes from Keats’ poem “La Belle Dame San Merci”

[betenoir]

“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is taken from Tolstoy

'Cept for the Vegas part. I don’t thing Tolstoy had been to Vegas.

[panamajack]

Thomas Gray is hardly remenbered but for his “Elegy written in a Country Church-yard”,
which yielded two titles :

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
…
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.

The first was used for Humphrey Cobb’s book (later made into a movie), and the second by Thomas Hardy.