Shangri-La (musical) Shangri-La (musical) Shangri-La is a musical with a book and lyrics by James Hilton, Jerome Lawrence, and Robert E. Lee and music by Harry Warren. Based on Hilton's classic 1933 novel "Lost Horizon", it focuses on Hugh Conway, a veteran member of the British diplomatic service, who stumbles across a utopian lamasery high in the Himalayas in Tibet after surviving a plane crash in the mountainous terrain. When the dying High Lama asks him to take charge after his death, Conway must decide between embracing the inner peace, love, and sense of purpose he has discovered in this mysterious world
Lost Horizon called the first American paperback book, when in fact paperbacks had been around since the mid-1800s. What made Pocket Book #1 of revolutionary importance was that it was the first "mass-market" paperback; mass market paperbacks allowed people of modest means not only to own books they otherwise could not afford but also to slip the paperback into their pocket for casual reading on the go, hence the name "Pocket Book". By the 1960s, Pocket Books alone, over the course of more than 40 printings, had sold several million copies of "Lost Horizon", helping to make it one of the most