Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers
“—JACK KEROUAC,ON THE ROAD In most bestsellers, there’s a central character who sets off on a journey that takes her from rustic America into turbulent urban landscapes, where her agrarian values either help her succeed or doom her to failure. Almost as often, the heroes of bestsellers make an exodus in the opposite direction, from the pressures of cities to the bucolic countryside.
Journeys of this type have mythic echoes as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh (one of the earliest-known narrative tales), a story in which the hero left the safety of the walled city to trek off to the edges of the world. This narrative structure, the hero’s journey, as it is sometimes called, was the basis of Joseph Campbell’s landmark work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In our contemporary era, the same structural underpinnings are at work in popular films from Star Wars to The Wizard of Oz, as Christopher Vogler so thoroughly describes in his practical guide for aspiring Hollywood screen writers, The Writer...’s Journey.MoreLess
Journeys of this type have mythic echoes as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh (one of the earliest-known narrative tales), a story in which the hero left the safety of the walled city to trek off to the edges of the world. This narrative structure, the hero’s journey, as it is sometimes called, was the basis of Joseph Campbell’s landmark work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In our contemporary era, the same structural underpinnings are at work in popular films from Star Wars to The Wizard of Oz, as Christopher Vogler so thoroughly describes in his practical guide for aspiring Hollywood screen writers, The Writer...’s Journey.MoreLess
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