In the Beginning : I Think It Was Sly of Melville, Calling His Narrator Ishmael. : What If His Name Had Been Clarence?’

It seems axiomatic that a book’s most important sentence is the first, unless you happen to be one of those who always look at the last page first, to see how it turns out.

The most famous first line in American literature is certainly “Call me Ishmael,” the clarion beginning of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” though I never cared for it much myself. I think it was sly of Melville, calling his narrator Ishmael. What if his name had been Clarence? or Fred? Would “Call me Clarence” have been a great beginning? “Call me Fred”?

Probably the most famous first line of any novel in literature, though, is that of Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

In a new book, “From These Beginnings: Openings of 50 Major Literary Works” (Schocken), Baird W. Whitlock points out an irony that Tolstoy may not have intended: “The sentence can almost as easily be reversed for an equally true statement, and it is often misquoted that way.”

Perhaps no first line ever stated more succinctly the theme of the novel to follow than that of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”: “ ‘Tis a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Like Tolstoy’s aphorism, Jane Austen’s may also be reversed. For who can doubt that every single woman without a fortune must be in want of a husband?

At least that was so in Jane Austen’s time.

As Whitlock points out, the opening of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” is “quintessential Hemingway” and perhaps the most quoted beginning paragraph in 20th-Century American prose:

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plains to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees . . .”

Those of us who are satiated with Hemingway parodies, including his own, need only return to that early novel to see that his prose, like his water, was “clear and swiftly moving.”

In “1984,” George Orwell alerts us at once to a world that has gone askew: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

In “The Red Badge of Courage,” his novel of the Civil War, Stephen Crane begins with a scene that is familiar to every soldier: “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.”

In “Darkness at Noon,” his novel of the Moscow purges, Arthur Koestler shuts out the familiar world of freedom and justice in six words: “The cell door slammed behind Rubashov.”

Thornton Wilder’s minor classic, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” begins with a sentence that might serve as a model of clear, terse, factual newspaper writing: “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.”

James Thurber’s wonderful fairy tale, “The Thirteen Clocks,” begins, like Orwell’s “1984,” with a hint that time is out of joint: “Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn’t go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda.”

Thurber reminds us that, of all beginnings, “Once upon a time” may still be best, unless you favor “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

My own favorite is this:

“It was the end of summer.”

It is brief; it gives us a sense of time and atmosphere; it sets a mood; it stirs our anticipation. Summer’s end is bittersweet: the end of summer romance, a time of going back to school, home, reality. It is the end of youth.

Those six words are the beginning of my own first novel. I’ve been working on it for 35 years, and that’s as far as I’ve got.

So I’m not in Whitlock’s book. But maybe I’ll make it in the next edition.