The Genesis of Great Literature

The Inspiration Behind 7 Influential Books

Writers are often asked about what inspires the themes, characters, and settings within their books. As readers, we may find our own inspiration nuzzling in the pages of a beloved novel, but we may not realize how deeply rooted those novels are in real life. With help from Jake Grogan’s Origins of a Story, we’ve compiled a few of our favorite stories that inspired our favorite classics. Reader beware: There are spoilers ahead.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937)

Steinbeck’s story was inspired by the working conditions of field hands in his hometown of Salinas, California. He noticed migrant workers faced poor living conditions despite their dogged pursuit of the American dream. Of Mice and Men was his way of placing their pursuit on the page. The title of the book was taken from a Robert Burns poem titled “To a Mouse,” which reads, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley,” or, “The best laid schemes of mice and men / Often go awry.”

Some of book’s characters were based on the migrant workers Steinbeck traveled with as a young adult. In a 1937 New York Times interview, he said, “Lennie was a real person. He’s in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn’t kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how many times I saw him do it. We couldn’t stop him until it was too late.”

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (1964)

The candy-making industry in the early- to mid-1900s was a difficult terrain to navigate, especially for small businesses. Because candy recipes aren’t easy to patent, candy companies regularly stole their competitors’ products. This led to espionage both within and outside of companies. Dahl worked as a taste-tester for Cadbury when he was thirteen, and he disliked the role competition played in the industry. This is evident in the quote from his book:

“You see, Charlie, not so very long ago there used to be thousands of people working in Mr. Willy Wonka’s factory. Then one day, all of a sudden, Mr. Wonka had to ask every single one of them to leave, to go home, never to come back.”
“But why?” asked Charlie.
“Because of spies.”
“Spies?”
“Yes. All the other chocolate makers, you see, had begun to grow jealous of the wonderful candies that Mr. Wonka was making, and they started sending in spies to steal his secret recipes. The spies took jobs in the Wonka factory, pretending they were ordinary workers, and while they were there, each one of them found out exactly how a certain special thing was made.”

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Despite disliking James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf found inspiration in it. She wrote in her diary: “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the books of a self-taught working man, we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating…” However, both books move frictionlessly through time, both are set in a single June day, and both contain two primary narratives.

Clarissa’s character was also inspired by Woolf’s childhood friend Kitty Maxse. In a letter to her sister, the author admitted Clarissa was “almost Kitty verbatim,” although Kitty herself died after falling over a staircase banister. Woolf considered killing off Clarissa as well, but opted to kill WWI veteran Septimus Smith instead— a character whose poor mental health was inspired by Woolf’s own. Septimus’s hallucination of birds singing in Greek was one she had experienced herself.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)

After publishing This Side of Paradise in 1920, Fitzgerald was skyrocketed to the elite class of Roaring Twenties fame. The parties he attended inspired those featured in The Great Gatsby, and a 2011 Los Angeles Times article infers Gatsby’s West Egg mansion was based on a Gold Coast mansion in Long Island named Land’s End.

Characters Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby both find their origins in the author himself. Nick’s education was in the Ivy Leagues. Of his own Ivy League education, Fitzgerald wrote “All my harsh smartness has been kept ruthlessly out of [The Great Gatsby]— it’s the greatest weakness in my work, distracting and disfiguring it even when it calls up an isolated sardonic laugh.”

Gatsby met Daisy while actively stationed in the military, while Fitzgerald met his wife, Zelda, during his own military duty in Alabama’s Camp Sheridan. Zelda was also a wealthy debutante like Daisy, and Fitzgerald both idolized her and ingratiated himself with her.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)

Burnett’s Misselthwaite Manor was famously inspired by her own estate, Great Maytham Hall in Kent, where she tended to her own illustrious garden. She moved there after her infamous divorce from Swan Burnett, but had to give it up after nearly a decade because she could not afford to buy it. She wrote The Secret Garden after moving to Long Island as an ode to the home she couldn’t keep.

Of her departure, Burnett wrote to her sister, “It was living at Maytham which meant England to me, in a way…That place belongs to me— it is the only place I ever felt was home…” Read more about Burnett’s life, inspiration, and other works in Unearthing the Secret Garden by Marta McDowell.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

The first iteration of Alice and her magical world came on a boating trip, where mathematician Charles Dodgson (famously known as Lewis Carroll) kept his friend’s younger sisters entertained. One of the sisters was named Alice Liddell, evidently the inspiration for the protagonist’s name, but more importantly, the first and greatest love of Carroll’s life. She adored his stories and eventually requested he write them down. This eventually transformed into his original manuscript for a book titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which he retitled Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (where he also added the Mad Hatter tea party scene and introduced the Cheshire Cat) before publication.

Much later, when requested to attend a tea party in honor of the then-deceased Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddell is famously quoted as saying, “But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is. Only I do get tired.”

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)

Faulkner’s wildly innovative novel was born from the ashes of a post-Civil War Southern identity crisis. In a time of collapsing aristocracy, Faulkner belonged to a prominent Southern family but never finished high school himself. As the definition of Southern historical greatness was challenged by the forced change in values, Faulkner too was haunted by an ancestral expectation he could not achieve. A great cultural shift and his own perceived failures gave the author the perspective rooted in the book.