Titles From Literature

This morning in the shower, I was struck by how many authors have used phrases from other works as the titles of theirs. Screenwriters do the same. In fact, it was Jerome Bixby’s Star Trek:TOS episode “By Any Other Name” that started my idle brain a-thinking. I remembered that Babylon 5 used “The Paragon of Animals” (from Hamlet) as the title of a Season 5 episode, and there some other in the Star Trek Universe from Shakespeare as well. What others are out there? Who is the most-quoted author?

National Lampoon did a parody of this sort of thing, taking a speech from Shakespeare and dissecting it into three- or four-word titles that they then placed next to each other in a parody of the New York Times Book Review, with a brief description of each book.
There are simply too many of these to list. I’ll bet Shakespeare gets top billing (“The Sound and the Fury”, “All Our Yesterdays”, etc.) , maybe followed by the Bible.

Most quoted author is definitely Shakespeare. Star Trek alone used “The Conscience of the King” and “The Undiscovered Country” and probably one or two more. “Brave New World” was also from Shakespeare. It helps that his work is in public domain. :slight_smile:

In fiction, Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” had inspired titles like “World Enough and Time,” “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” “A Fine and Private Place”

Philip Roth’s short story “The Conversion of the Jews” also comes from the same Marvell poem, and the Robin Williams’ movie “What Dreams May Come” also derives its title from HAMLET. Probably you can wring a few more titles out of those two works alone.

Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes is from MacBeth.

I agree Shakespeare is most-quoted. When I first saw Hamlet, I was amazed by how many phrases used regularly today came from that play alone.

Dickens might be a good runner-up.

In many cases I learned the title of the book long before I read the poem that inspired the title. A few other instances that haven’t been mentioned yet: Philip Jose Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go comes from a sonnet by John Donne, Phil Pullman’s His Dark Materials is from Milton’s Paradise Lost, and half the books by John Steinbeck take their titles from classical poetry: Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Winter of our Discontent, and so forth.

Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires and Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey both come from T. S. Eliot poems, Burnt Norton and The Journey of the Magi respectively. I’m sure there’s lots of other Eliot titles around.

James Herriot’s book titles come from the hymn:

All Things Bright And Beautiful
All Creatures Great and Small
All Things Wise and Wonderful
The Lord God Made Them All

Iain M. Banks has used at least two phrases from Elliot’s “The Waste Land” as titles for his books. Consider Phlebas, and Look to Windward are two examples. Not sure if there are any more.

James Tiptree, Jr. used a line from Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans merci” to title “And I Awoke to Find Me Here on the Cold Hill Side.” I read the story before the poem, and when I was reading the poem, I thought “there’s a story in here,” then discovered the line.

“Inherit the Wind” is a Biblical title, but I’m having trouble thinking of others.

The most recent episode of Veronica Mars was titled after a quote from “Dirty Dancing.” Does that count? :smiley:

“Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner”?

It’s literature, right? :smiley:

Genesis, the Wind & Wuthering album, “Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers…” “…In That Quiet Earth.” The phrase, distributed between two segue’d tracks, is taken from the end of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

“Stranger In a Strange Land” is a quote from an ancient Greek verse play - I want to say that it is “Philoctetes”, but can’t definitely.

Anyway, the plot of the Hellenistic play revolves around a Greek warrior friend of Odysseus who is inexplicably abandoned on a deserted isle and spends decades alone, until Odysseus recalls he left his fabled bow (which an Oracle states he must reclaim if the Greeks are to win the Trojan war) in Philoctetes’ possession. Thus, Odysseus goes to rescue his old pal. During one choral interlude, Philoctetes is described as a “stranger in a strange land” as he is marooned in a hostile environment, but doesn’t feel as if he has any more allegience to Greece, since he was foresaken by them. (Heinlein’s book is a rather broad adaptation of this plot as well.)

I have heard of two books that took their titles from Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”: Things Fall Apart and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. And of course there is The Road Less Traveled by Dr. Scott Peck, taken from Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”

East of Eden

Which reminds me that one of Harry Turtledove’s alternate history novels is called The Center Cannot Hold.

Exodus 2:22 (KJV). Spoken by Moses after he’s exiled from Egypt: