“IT WAS A DARK and stormy night…” Dying to know more? Edward George Bulwer-Lytton hoped you would be: he penned this now-clichéd opening for his novel Paul Clifford (1830). In his honor, the English Department at San Jose State University now holds the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a competition in which writers submit the worst opening lines they can. The openers below might not get the Bulwer-Lytton nod, but see how many of the novels you can identify based on these first lines.
1. You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.
2. Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.
3. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
4. I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting around the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947.
5. The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
ANSWERS
1. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.
2. Ahab’s Wife, by Sena Jeter Naslund.
3. 1984, by George Orwell.
4. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie.
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin.