James Hilton - Trivia

Novelist, born in Leigh, Lancashire, NW England, UK. He studied at Cambridge, and quickly established himself as a writer, his first novel, Catherine Herself, being published in 1920. His success was dual, for many of his novels were filmed, notably Lost Horizon (1933, Hawthornden Prize), and Goodbye Mr Chips (1934). He settled in the USA in 1935.

James Hilton (September 9, 1900 - December 20, 1954) was a popular English novelist of the first half of the 20th century.

Born in Leigh, in Lancashire, England on 9 September 1900, he was the son of John Hilton, the headmaster of Chapel End School in Walthamstow. His father was one of the inspirations for Mr Chipping in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Hilton's most beloved novel. (Hilton was born on Wilkinson Street in Leigh - there is a teacher in Goodbye, Mr Chips called Mr Wilkinson, which seems too deliberate to be a coincidence.) The setting for Goodbye, Mr Chips is believed to have been based on the Leys School, Cambridge, where James Hilton was a pupil. Balgarnie, one of the masters of the school who was in charge of the Leys Fortnightly (where Hilton's first short stories and essays were published).

Hilton found literary success at an early age.

Hilton, who lived and worked in Hollywood beginning in the mid-1930s, won an Oscar in 1942 for his work on the screenplay of Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther.

He popularised the term "Shangri-La" in his novel Lost Horizon, which may have been inspired by the Tibetan travel articles of explorer Joseph Rock. US President Roosevelt named his Maryland presidential retreat "Shangri-La" after it, and the name has become a byword for a mythical utopia - a permanently happy land, isolated from the world. (Later, President Dwight David Eisenhower renamed the retreat Camp David after his grandson, the name by which it is known today.) Zhongdian, a mountain region of southwest China, has now been renamed Shangri-La (Xianggelila), based on its claim to have inspired Hilton's book.

Hilton's books are sometimes dismissed as sentimental celebrations of English virtues.

Trivia

Following the Doolittle raid on Tokyo in 1942, when a force of normally land-based bombers were successfully embarked on and flown off an aircraft carrier, the Japanese were baffled as to how such aircraft were able to reach and bomb Japan, given that there were no American land bases within range at that time. A furore was caused in the late 1990s, when the Wigan Council (the Metropolitan Borough responsible for Leigh) announced that a blue plaque in honour of Hilton would be placed not on his house in Wilkinson Street, but on the town hall. Hilton's novel So Well Remembered was filmed in 1947 with John Mills in the lead role of George Boswell. Hilton himself narrates the film.