Utopia regained in some way or other. One way might be a quest for an "earthly paradise"—a place like Shangri-La, hidden in the Tibetan mountains and described by James Hilton in his utopian novel "Lost Horizon" (1933). Christopher Columbus followed directly in this tradition in his belief that he had found the Garden of Eden when, towards the end of the 15th century, he first encountered the New World and its indigenous inhabitants. Utopia A utopia ( ) is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens. The opposite of a utopia is
James Hilton (novelist) 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. Freud – an early admirer (though he considered "The Meadows of the Moon" below par) – came to conclude that Hilton had wasted his talent by being too prolific. 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,