Some book titles feel so natural that we forget someone had to invent them. Quite a few of the best known ones were borrowed, lifted from a line of verse the author had read years earlier.
This list looks at ten novels that took their names . In each case the source is well documented, and the borrowed words often shape how the book reads.
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck’s 1937 novella takes its title from “To a Mouse,” a poem written by Robert Burns in 1785. The poem was composed after Burns accidentally turned up a mouse’s nest with his plough. Its central idea is that even careful plans can go wrong.
That idea fits the story of George and Lennie, two migrant workers who dream of owning a small piece of land. Their plan feels modest and reachable, yet it keeps slipping away. The borrowed title tells readers early that hopes like theirs are fragile.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck went to verse again for his 1939 novel. The title comes from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” written by Julia Ward Howe and first published in 1862. The hymn uses the image of grapes being trampled in a winepress, a picture of judgment.
The novel follows the Joad family as they leave Dust Bowl Oklahoma for California. By the time you finish it, the title reads as a warning about anger building among people who have been treated unfairly. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1940.
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald published this novel in 1934, and its title comes from John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” Keats wrote the poem in 1819. It is a meditation on beauty, escape and mortality, set in a darkened garden.
The novel tells of Dick Diver, a psychiatrist on the French Riviera, and his slow decline. The soft, romantic phrase from Keats sits against a story about disintegration. That contrast is part of what makes the title linger.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Achebe’s 1958 novel borrows its title from “The Second Coming,” a poem by W. B. Yeats first published in 1920. Yeats wrote it in the shadow of the First World War. It describes a world in which the center cannot hold.
Achebe applied that image to Igbo society at the moment British colonial rule and missionary influence arrived. The story centers on Okonkwo, a proud wrestler and farmer whose world is changing around him. The novel is now among the most widely read works of African literature.
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe’s first novel appeared in 1929. Its title comes from “Lycidas,” a pastoral elegy John Milton wrote in 1637 after the death of a friend. Milton’s poem mourns a young man lost at sea.
Wolfe’s book is a heavily autobiographical story about Eugene Gant, who grows up in a fictional town based on Asheville, North Carolina. The elegiac source suits a novel about memory, family and the pain of leaving home. Wolfe’s own life and the book overlapped enough that locals in Asheville famously took offense.
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Hardy’s novel was published in 1874 and takes its title from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which dates to 1751. Gray’s poem is a quiet reflection on ordinary rural lives and the graves they leave behind. The phrase refers to a life lived away from noisy ambition.
Hardy sets his story in the farmland of his fictional Wessex. It follows Bathsheba Everdene, an independent woman who runs a farm and attracts three very different suitors. The title promises calm, which the plot then keeps interrupting.
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Salinger’s 1951 novel takes its title from “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye,” a Robert Burns poem. In the book, Holden Caulfield misremembers the line, and that misreading becomes the center of his fantasy. He imagines himself standing at the edge of a cliff, saving children from falling.
The misquotation is a clever device because it shows how a teenager bends a poem to fit his own feelings. Holden’s version is not what Burns wrote, and the novel lets that gap stand. It is one of the more unusual cases of a title being explained by a character’s mistake.
Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
Forster’s first published novel appeared in 1905. Its title comes from Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism,” written in 1711. The line it echoes warns that fools rush into places where wiser beings hesitate.
The story follows English characters who travel to Italy and stumble into a clash of cultures and expectations. Their confident, careless choices lead to real tragedy. Forster uses the borrowed phrase as a gentle warning about English assumptions abroad.
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh published this novel in 1934. The title comes from T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which appeared in 1922. Eliot’s poem includes a famous image of fear shown in a handful of dust.
The novel follows Tony Last, whose marriage collapses and whose life ends up in a bleak, ironic place. Waugh’s tone is dry and often cruel, which suits the desolate source. The title points to a modern world that looks civilized but feels empty.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
McCullers published her debut novel in 1940, when she was still in her early twenties. The title comes from a poem by Fiona Macleod, the pen name of the Scottish writer William Sharp. The borrowed line describes the heart as a solitary seeker.
The book is set in a small Georgia town and follows several lonely people who confide in a deaf man named John Singer. Each of them projects their own needs onto him. The title sums up the novel’s central subject, which is isolation and the search for someone to understand you.
