Because what else would it be inspired by?
Don’t believe me? So, I was browsing around on Pinterest and ran across this:
I’ve heard about this one being one of the earliest genre romances of the 20th century. Which meant it was old enough it probably had a plain hardback cover originally but I was curious as to what the original paperback one might have been.
Okay, that’s more like it but I sill don’t know if that’s the first.
Another thing I’ve heard about this book is that it was the inspiration, or at least one of them, for the early silent movie sheik films put out by Hollywood.
Regarding E M Hull and The Sheik:
She dabbled writing fiction in the late 1910s while her husband was away serving in World War I. The Sheik, her first effort, was first published in England in 1919 and quickly became an international blockbuster, placing among Publishers Weekly’s top ten best sellers for both of the years 1921 and 1922. Hull’s volume quickly sold over 1.2 million copies worldwide. Sales further increased when Paramount released a film version of The Sheik in 1921, which launched Rudolph Valentino into cinema immortality as the greatest “lover” of the silent screen. She died at age 66, on 11 February 1947 in Hazelwood, in the parish of Duffield, Derbyshire.
E M Hull (Edith Maude Hull) (1880 – 1947)
Which makes this 2014 over make a lot more sense:
Does this mean we’ve come a long way or that we’ve come full circle? Hmmm?