James Hilton

At 54 years old, James Hilton physical status not available right now. We will update James Hilton's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

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 1952, Hilton was also host of one of radio's prestige drama anthologies, Hallmark Playhouse. He also presented six episodes of Ceiling Unlimited (1943) and hosted The Hallmark Playhouse (1948–1953) for CBS Radio.

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.

The name "Shangri-La" has become a byword for a mythical utopia, a permanently happy land, isolated from the world. After the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, when the fact that the bombers had flown from an aircraft carrier remained highly classified, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the press facetiously that they had taken off from Shangri-La. The Navy subsequently gave that name to an aircraft carrier, and Roosevelt named his presidential retreat in Maryland Shangri-La. (Later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower renamed the retreat Camp David after his grandson, and that name has been used for it ever since.) Zhongdian, a mountain region of south-west China, has been renamed Shangri-La (Xianggelila), based on its claim to have inspired Hilton's book.

W.H. Balgarnie, a master at The Leys School, Cambridge and Hilton's father, headmaster of Chapel End School in Walthamstow, were the inspirations for the character of Mr. Chipping in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, a best-seller. Hilton first sent the material to The Atlantic, and the magazine printed it as a short story in April 1934. On 8 June, it was published as a book. Four months later it appeared as a book in Britain.

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