That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis is taken from Scottish poet Davis Lyndsay’s Dialog:
The shadow of that hyddeous strength sax myle and more it is of length
(In the poem, “that hyddeous strength” describes the Tower of Babel.)
And One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is from Mother Goose:
Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn;
Wire, briar, limber lock,
Three geese in a flock.
One flew east,
And one flew west,
And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
Heinlein also has I Will Fear No Evil and The Number of the Beast, both biblical.
Forgot to mention - I don’t think “All Quiet on the Western Front” is a quote from anything. The original (German) title is Im Westen nichts neues (lit. “nothing new in the West”) which probably was an actual report used at one time or another, though the double meaning is definitely intentional. A literal translation might have implied another meaning for ‘West’, but German doesn’t generally use the terms ‘East’ and ‘West’ to indicate regions of the world.
Catcher in the Rye is a reference to Comin’ Thro the Rye by Robert Burns.
Thanks for this. After the post where I mentioned that it sounded like it ought to refer to something, I checked Wikipedia to see essentially what you’ve posted.
Oh, well…
And the title of Heinlein’s first novel, For Us, the Living, comes from the Gettysburg Address.
It’s taken from the phrase “All Quiet Along the Potomac,” a Civil War poem, with that phrase adapted from General McClellan’s frequent reports. Here is the obligatory Wikipedia link.
Nabokov’s Pale Fire gets its title from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens,
“The moon’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun”
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus alludes to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.
Richard Matheson’s **What Dreams May Come ** and Joe Haldeman’s All **My Sins Remembered ** both take their titles from Hamlet’s “to be, or not to be…” soliloquy.
Iain M. Banks has a few titles that do this:
Consider Phlebas & Look To Windward reference Eliot’s The Waste Land:
Against a Dark Background may contain a nod to Le Guin’s essay, Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown
I’ve always felt that both Feersum Endjinn and Use of Weapons sound like literary references, but never heard any speculation as to what.
Not having read Faulkner, I cannot verify this, but it’s my understanding that the viewpoint character of The Sound and the Fury suffers from mental deficiencies, making it truly “…a tale told by an idiot…”
Robert Penn Warren’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is taken directly from the Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 44:1.
Jayjay has already noted Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, but the central “gimmick” of the story is the experience of the person who was the world’s first brain transplant, who encounters the (real or delusional?) survival of the body’s former inhabitant “in there with him.” Hence the peculiar appropriateness of Psalm 23: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”*
Arthur C. Clarke’s early novel of Diaspar, a city set up to withstand the changes and chances of millions of years of time, takes its title from an A.E. Housman poem:
Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel is taken from John Milton’s Lycidas:
*Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the haples youth. *
JD Salinger’s “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter” comes from the opening line in Sappho’s “The Wedding March.”
Several of Joan Didion’s books refer to other famous works, like A Book of Common Prayer, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (from Yeats’ “The Second Coming”) and The White Album (which is the popular name of the Beatles’ The Beatles).
Another from Paradise Lost is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which takes its title from this bit:
But all these in thir pregnant causes mix’t
Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
The Golden Compass is also from Milton, but a different sort of compass:
and in his hand
He took the golden Compasses, prepar’d
In Gods Eternal store, to circumscribe
This Universe, and all created things
Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos takes its name from the Keats poem. King’s Dark Tower series references Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and the title of the third book just adds an “s” to Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” And of course, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead takes not only its title, but a good portion of its dialogue, from Hamlet.
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom is a quote of 2 Samuel 18:33.
Regards,
Shodan
Joe Haldeman often uses Biblical and Shakespearean quotations in his story titles. Study War No More, a collection of SF stories about the end of armed conflict, is from Isaiah 2:3-5. “A Summer’s Lease,” a wonderful short story about a human colony on another world that is slowly losing knowledge of its own past, is from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. Haldeman also draws on Sonnet 18 in an even more clever and intriguing way in his short story “For White Hill,” found in the collection A Separate War and Other Stories, the title of which itself references A Separate Peace by John Knowles.
Several Star Trek episode and movie titles refer to Shakespeare, incl. “The Conscience of the King” and The Undiscovered Country (both from Hamlet, IIRC).
Devices and Desires by P. D. James takes its title from the confession in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.”
Apparently, this movie coming out soon called The Last Mimzy got its title from the story it’s based upon, Mimsy Were The Borogoves, which is a line from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”
Two that immediately come to mind are from the same quote of Shakespeare’s “Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war,” at the Marc Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar.
Both, Cry Havoc and The Dogs of War were popular movies and the latter was a very good book by Frederic Forsythe.
Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Across the River and into the Trees were all from other sources.
I am sure someone has mentioned it (although I didn’t see it because I probably did a bad job of reading) but Rosencrantz and Gildensturn are Dead is one of the most obvious answers to this thread - straight out of that Hamlet guy’s play.