Lost Horizon
by James Hilton
Summary
British consul Hugh Conway is one of four passengers evacuated by aircraft from the city of Baskul during a local uprising, along with the younger diplomat Charles Mallinson, the American Henry Barnard, and the missionary Roberta Brinklow. The plane is secretly hijacked and crashes deep in the Tibetan mountains, and the survivors are led to Shangri La, a lamasery hidden in a warm, fertile valley where residents age at a fraction of the normal rate. Conway learns from the dying High Lama, a Catholic monk named Perrault who has lived there since the eighteenth century, that the community exists to preserve civilization's finest work against a coming age of violence, and the old man asks Conway to stay and lead it after he dies. Mallinson, desperate to leave and suspicious of the valley's hold on Conway, persuades him to escape with a young woman named Lo-Tsen who wants out as well. The novel, framed as a manuscript read by a narrator in Berlin years later, ends ambiguously: Conway vanishes after leaving, and the narrator's friend Rutherford finds only secondhand evidence, including a very old Chinese woman brought to a hospital who may have been Lo-Tsen suddenly aged, suggesting Conway spent the rest of his life trying to find his way back.
Hilton writes the whole book as an adventure story wrapped around a quiet argument for moderation over extremity, and it reads briskly, more interested in its central idea, that civilization needs somewhere to wait out its own worst impulses, than in any one character. The unresolved ending, refusing to say outright whether Shangri La was real or whether Conway ever returned, is exactly what has kept readers arguing over the book for generations rather than shelving it as settled.
Hilton invented the word Shangri La for this novel, and it entered English so completely that Franklin Roosevelt named his own Maryland retreat after it, decades before the site became better known as Camp David. Lost Horizon found its wide audience only after Hilton's next book, Goodbye Mr Chips, made his name in 1934, and it went on to become the first title ever issued as a mass market paperback in the United States, published as Pocket Book No. 1 in 1939.
Historical Context & Significance
Lost Horizon did win a prize, and an old one: Macmillan published it in 1933 and in 1934 it took the Hawthornden Prize, one of Britain's oldest literary awards, founded in 1919 and given each year for a work of imaginative literature by a younger writer. No American prize followed, since the Pulitzer was closed to a British novel, and the book became a slow burning bestseller rather than a prize story, helped along once Goodbye Mr Chips made Hilton famous and sent readers back to find his earlier novel.
Pocket Books' 1939 mass market edition went through dozens of printings and sold in the millions, cementing Shangri La as shorthand for any hidden paradise. Frank Capra's 1937 film version, starring Ronald Colman as Conway, brought the story to an even wider audience, and a 1973 musical adaptation followed, though neither has matched the staying power of the word Hilton coined, which now names hotels, retreats and resorts on every continent without most people who use it knowing where it came from.