The Gay Triangle: The Romance of the First Air Adventurers

Le Queux, William, 1864-1927Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.7
Word count
277K words
Chapters
28

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Early FlightScience FantasyLegendary LivesAdventure JourneyRomantic FantasyAviation AdventureHeroismGrowing UpPopular NarrativeSocial Observation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Gay Triangle: The Romance of the First Air Adventurers by William Le QueuxAuthor: Le Queux, William, 1864-1927,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Nov 23, 2012

Editor's review

This work comes from the English popular novelist William Le Queux and takes early aviation adventure as its subject, belonging to the "aviation romance" type of fiction popular in the early twentieth century. The "triangle" in the title and the "first air adventurers" suggest an interweaving of personal relationships with the spirit of the age, letting readers sense the mixed feelings of longing and awe with which people regarded the sky when the aeroplane was still a novelty. Le Queux was skilled at driving a narrative through tight plotting and suspense, and this book is a useful sample of the early forms of aviation-themed popular literature. It is worth reading in the technological context of the early twentieth century, to see how writers of the time imagined flight and wove romance and crisis around aviation adventure. For readers studying popular literature, the cultural representation of aviation history, or graded English reading, it is an original text of moderate length and modest linguistic difficulty.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the opening chapters first to grasp the character relationships and the aviation setting, then decide on your reading pace.
  2. Don't worry about unfamiliar aviation terms at first; follow the plot and the characters' motives instead.
  3. Read it alongside a brief history of early twentieth-century aviation to understand the technological context the novel imagines.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28

FAQ

Is this a work of nonfiction or a novel? From the available information, the book is classified under English literature (PR), and Le Queux was known for fictional narrative; the subtitle "The Romance of the First Air Adventurers" also points to a fictionalized adventure story rather than strict reportage. It is best read as literary imagination rather than aviation history.
How difficult is the English? The work dates from the early twentieth century; its style is old-fashioned but its sentences are not especially difficult, suiting readers with intermediate English who are willing to adapt to older expression. Proper names and aviation-related vocabulary may need looking up.
Why is the book called "The Gay Triangle"? The available information gives no plot details, so it is not possible to confirm what "triangle" refers to. From the structure of the title, it may hint at a love triangle among the characters, or at a flight route or some metaphor; readers will have to judge for themselves from the text.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Le Queux, William, 1864-1927 Author

William Le Queux (1864–1927) was a British writer of popular fiction, with 74 of his works held in this collection. He is best known for invasion-scare and spy-adventure stories; The Invasion of 1910, which depicts a German invasion of Britain and the siege of London, drew considerable attention in its day, and The Great War in England in 1897 belongs to the same vein. His other works centre on mystery, intrigue and international espionage, such as The Zeppelin Destroyer, The Secrets of Potsdam, The Closed Book: Concerning the Secret of the Borgias and The Golden Face: A Great ‘Crook’ Romance, all marked by tight plotting and dense suspense. Le Queux often set fictional crises against real places to create a sense of urgency, and his work had some influence on the development of early spy fiction and thrillers. Public information is limited, so biographical details are not elaborated here.