James Hilton (novelist) 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 Magazine" 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 travellers in Tibet whose writings were found in the British Library. Christian Zeeman, the Danish father of the mathematician Christopher
Oh What a Paradise It Seems themes, including love, lust, life in suburbia, and a sense of displacement. Writing in the "New York Times", John Leonard called the novella "perfect Cheever; it is perfect, period." John Updike, a friend of Cheever, preferred it to Cheever's novel "Falconer", and remarked on the theme of ice skating, which he called his "Wordsworthian hike" and his "connection with elemental purity and the awesome depths above and below". Oh What a Paradise It Seems Oh What a Paradise It Seems is a 1982 novella by John Cheever. It is Cheever's last work of fiction, published shortly before his death from