Editing James Hilton (novelist) (section)

===''Lost Horizon''===
First published in 1933, this novel won Hilton the [[Hawthornden Prize]] in 1934.<ref name="Times-1934-Jun-13">{{cite newspaper The Times|title=The Hawthornden Prize – Award to Author of "Lost Horizon"|department=News|date=13 June 1934|page=13|issue=46779}}</ref> 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 [[Tibet]]an 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.<ref>Michael Buckley ''Shangri-La: A Travel Guide to the Himalayan Dream'', Bradt Travel Guides, Chalfont St. Peter 2008, p37</ref> Christian Zeeman, the [[Danes|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.{{Citation needed|date=March 2009}}

Some say that the isolated valley town of [[Weaverville, California]], in far-northern [[Trinity County, California|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.<ref>S. Benson, ''Lonely Planet California'' (2010) p. 325</ref> Coincidentally, [[Junction City, California|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 [[USS Shangri-La|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 in the northwest of Yunnan province China, has been renamed Shangri-La (Xianggelila), based on its claim to have inspired Hilton's book.<ref>Chapter 4 "Shangri-La: A Travel Guide to the Himalayan Dream". Michael Buckley, Bradt Travel Guides, Chalfont St. Peter 2008</ref>