Great First Lines Peggy Korman CNM

First lines of a novel. The first line sets the scene, the tone, sheds just enough light on the upcoming story to make you keep reading.

A great first line stays with you long after you finish the novel.

“I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong hills.”

Out of Africa

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

A Tale of Two Cities

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that, a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Pride and Prejudice

“All children, except one, grow up.”

Peter Pan

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“Call me Ishmael.”

Moby Dick

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?”

Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland

“On May 18,1860, the day when the Republican Party would nominate its candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln was up early.”

Team of Rivals

“ If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I d0n’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

J.D. SALINGER The Cather in the Rye

“From the west-facing window of the room in which Meriwether Lewis was born on August 18,1774, one could look out at Rockfish Gap, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, an opening to the West that invited exploration.”

STEPHEN AMBROSE Undaunted Courage Merriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West

“A mile above OZ, the witch balanced on the wind’s forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent wheeling away by the turbulent air.”

WICKED Gregory Maguire

“The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails and was at rest.”

HEART OF DARKNESS Joseph Conrad

“When he was thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD Harper Lee

“In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north.

JOHN ADAMS David McCollough