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
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,