詹姆斯·希尔顿

詹姆斯·希尔顿（英语：James Hilton，1900年9月9日—1954年12月20日），生于英国英格兰兰开夏，小说家，也是好莱坞剧作家。其作品中最著名的为《消失的地平线》与《万事师表》（Goodbye, Mr. Chips）。

生平

大学毕业于剑桥大学基督学院，主修英国文学。在大学期间，开始小说创作。

葬于Forest Lawn Memorial Park。

James Hilton (9 September 1900 – 20 December 1954) was a British-American novelist and screenwriter. He is best remembered for his novels Lost Horizon; Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Random Harvest; and co-writing screenplays for the films Camille (1936) and Mrs. Miniver (1942), the latter earning him an Academy Award.

Early life and education

Hilton was born in Leigh, Lancashire, the son of John Hilton, the headmaster of Chapel End School in Walthamstow. He was educated at the Monoux School Walthamstow until 1914, then The Leys School, Cambridge, and then at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he wrote his first novel and was awarded an honours degree in English literature. He started work as a journalist, first for the Manchester Guardian, then reviewing fiction for The Daily Telegraph.

Career

Hilton's first novel, Catherine Herself, was published in 1920 when he was still an undergraduate. The next 11 years were difficult for him, and it was not until 1931 that he had success with the novel And Now Goodbye. Following this, 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). After this, he continued to write, but the works were not regarded as of the same quality as his better-known novels.

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.

Sigmund Freud, an early admirer despite his tepid reaction to The Meadows of the Moon, came to conclude that Hilton had wasted his talent by being too prolific.

From 1948 to 1953, Hilton was also host of one of radio's prestige drama anthologies, Hallmark Playhouse for CBS Radio. He also presented six episodes of Ceiling Unlimited (1943).

Lost Horizon

First published in 1933, this novel won Hilton the Hawthornden Prize in 1934. Later, Pocket Books, which pioneered the publication of small, soft-cover, inexpensive books, picked Lost Horizon as its first title in 1939. For that reason, the novel is frequently called the book that began the "paperback revolution."

Hilton is said to have been inspired to write Lost Horizon, and to invent "Shangri-La", by reading the National Geographic 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 travelers 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.

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.