The Best Beginnings in Great Literature [Discussion & Analysis] (Patreon)

Great opening sentences are keys to other worlds.

Today I would like to share with you a personal curation of resonant first lines from great literature.

And I would also like to ask you:

What are your favourite beginnings in literature?

Audio Timestamps

• 0:00 beginnings in literature
• 2:00 the KJV Bible
• 5:15 The Iliad of Homer
• 8:43 Chaucer’s Wife of Bath
• 10:54 Milton’s Paradise Lost
• 13:48 the plays of Shakespeare
• 15:06 Cervantes’ Don Quixote
• 16:20 Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
• 18:13 Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
• 19:36 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• 21:59 Bram Stoker’s Dracula
• 23:45 Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
• 25:37 Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
• 27:40 Dickens’ Great Expectations
• 29:20 George Eliot’s Middlemarch
• 31:00 Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native
• 32:53 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
• 34:34 Natsume Sōseki's I Am a Cat
• 36:10 James Joyce’s Ulysses
• 38:49 Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
• 40:00 J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
• 40:57 Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
• 42:39 Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock
• 43:20 James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
• 43:44 George Orwell’s 1984
• 45:10 Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
• 45:58 Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange
• 47:15 Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
• 48:30 Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho
• 50:02 Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club
• 50:59 Tomás Eloy Martínez’ Santa Evita
• 51:30 Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left-Hand of Darkness
• 53:35 what are your favourite beginnings?

Questions for You:

1) What first lines would make it into your file of great openings?

2) What qualities make for a powerful opening line? What pulls you into a story?

Happy reading, everybody!