Hunter S. Thompson and First Lines From Novels

This artwork sits before a bridge to the Thai Pavillion at Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin. The work, like the fist sentence to a novel, sets up what is to come for the visitor.


I bumped into a page on the American Book Review web site collecting the 100 best first lines from novels. I've always been partial to the first line of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." What a perfect first line to start to that particular story.