Pick up almost any serious novel and you’ll find it: a line or two of verse, a fragment of philosophy, a biblical passage, set alone on a page before the story begins. The epigraph is one of literature’s most deliberate gestures. Choosing one well is a minor art form in itself.
What an Epigraph Does
An epigraph is not decoration. At its best it sets a tonal key, plants a question the book will spend its pages answering, or places the work in conversation with a tradition the author wants to acknowledge or push against. F. Scott Fitzgerald opened The Great Gatsby with lines he attributed to “Thomas Parke D’Invilliers”—a character from his own earlier novel This Side of Paradise. The move was deliberate: he invented his own authority, a small joke about the manufacture of literary prestige.
Toni Morrison placed a passage from the Book of Romans at the start of Beloved: “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.” The resonance between that line and the novel’s exploration of enslaved identity and reclaimed selfhood is not incidental—it is the whole argument in miniature.
Famous Epigraphs and Their Functions
- Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises: “You are all a lost generation.” (Gertrude Stein) + Ecclesiastes 1:4–7. The pairing of a modern judgment with ancient scripture frames the novel’s restless, cyclical mood.
- Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: No epigraph—the absence itself is a statement about a world stripped of inherited wisdom.
- Plath, The Bell Jar: No traditional epigraph, but the title itself carries a meaning the reader unpacks gradually—a quiet inversion of the standard device.
- Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude: No epigraph, but the opening line functions as one: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Choosing a Quote That Earns Its Place
Writers choosing epigraphs face a temptation: the borrowed authority of a famous name. A Nietzsche quotation, a line from Rumi, a fragment of Keats—each comes with cultural weight that can make a book feel more serious than it has earned the right to be. The best epigraphs are chosen not for the name attached but for the exact sentence, and for the work it will do inside the specific book.
Joan Didion’s epigraphs tend toward the journalistic or the deceptively plain, matching her own prose style. Cormac McCarthy often forgoes them entirely, letting silence be its own statement. In both cases the decision is consistent with a larger aesthetic.
Reading Epigraphs as a Practice
Most readers skip epigraphs on first read. Returning to them after finishing the book is one of the small pleasures of rereading. You see the conversation the author was staging from the very first page, and you can judge whether the book lived up to its opening promise.
That judgment is a form of literary criticism available to any reader, no credentials required.