The First Great Novel and 74 more

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.” – Barbara Tuchman

NOVEL. 1 : an invented prose narrative that is usually long and complex and deals especially with human experience through a usually connected sequence of events. 2 : the literary genre consisting of novels. - Merriam‑Webster Dictionary 

I've been listing. Not listlessly listing. Just listing. I listed this, that and the other thing until I listed "this".

"This" is a list of what are among the irrefutably great (and since it's my list, I neither refute nor dispute that contention) first sentences to novels. Sentences that demand the reader proceed to the next sentence and the one beyond that and on and on until the end. You know 'em when you read 'em. Genuine page turners all.

Only novels, as defined by George Merriam (who he?) and West Hartford's own Noah Webster, were considered. Hence, you will find no play-ers like Willy the Shakes or the only other dramatist qualified to stand alongside him in the loftiest of pantheons (and more is the pity), Theodore Geisel. That's another list for another listing day.

Of all the millions of great first lines to great books, why limit the list to 75? Because I stopped to read some of them in whole or in part and, as time was rushing past, as time invariably does, there was a time to stop. And so, it ends where it ends. 

The sentences below are not ranked in any special order other than by year of publication. No attempt was made to rate any as being better than any other. The only criteria was that I had either read them before, wanted to read them again, or the first sentence alone made me want to read them for the first time. (Confession, I know it's among the greatest novels in the history of literature and the first line is a killer diller, but it's going to be a longer lifetime than the one I'm living before I read Moby Dick cover to cover - It just ain't gonna happen. 

We begin with the FIRST GREAT NOVEL and proceed, in chronological fashion, from there.

1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The Bible, Genesis 1:1 – authored by The Wandering Jews (Over the Course of Time) published by Burning Bush Press or so I've been told.

2. Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605)

3. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

4. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. We had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.  —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

5.  I am a sick man. I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there's something wrong with my liver." Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground  (1864)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

7. Squire Trelawnay, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-- and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.” Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883)

8.  You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

9. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

10. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.  —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

11. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

12. All children, except one, grow up. - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1911).

13. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

14. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

15. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. —Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)

16. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

17. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

18. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

19. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)

20. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'" —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

21. Elmer Gantry was drunk.  He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk. – Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry, (1926)

22. He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

23. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

24. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.  —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

25. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)

26. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

27. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.  —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

28. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. —Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

29. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. —Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

30. Mother died today.  Or maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.  - Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942)

31. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)

32. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. —William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)

33. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

34.  It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

35. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

36. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

37. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

38.  I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

39. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

40. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

41. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.  —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

42. It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

43. Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953)

44. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.  My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

45. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959)

46. Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. —Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)

47. It was love at first sight.  The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

48.  They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.” - Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)

49. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

50. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

51. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. —Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)

52. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

53. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

54. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

55.   It began as a mistake. - Charles Bukowski Post Office (1971)

56.    We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
           

57.   A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

58. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

59. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation.  —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

60. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)

61. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.  —James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)

62. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

63. You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

64. Psychics can see the color of time. It's blue. —Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)

65. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)

66.  It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful – Roald Dahl, Matilda (1988).
   

67. "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

68. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. —Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

69. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

70. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

71. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

72. They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

73. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

74. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

75.  A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins of a word of praise in exchange for a story … a writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price – Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel’s Game (2008)

THE END.