With which story may the term 'cliffhanger' originate (as there is a literal cliff hanging episode at the end of an instalment), and which very popular modern series of books has another literal cliffhanging ending to the first book?

star_gazer

The term 'cliffhanger' may have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. At the time newspapers published novels in a serial format with one chapter appearing every month. To ensure continued interest in the story, many authors employed different techniques. When the novel was serialised in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873, Hardy chose to leave one of the main protagonists, Henry Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock. This became the archetypal—and literal—cliff-hanger of Victorian prose. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliffhanger Dec 07 09, 6:32 PM

Baloo55th

Yay! for the first part of the question.... Now for a rather different sort of cliff. Dec 08 09, 7:38 AM