Fragments of the Arabian Nights translated into European languages circulated in the West as early as the fourteenth century, when Canterbury Tales author Geoffrey Chaucer based “The Squire’s Tale” on “The Ebony Horse,” one of the Arabian Nights stories. In 1704 Antoine Galland published the first volume of his popular French translation of the Arabian Nights (the collection’s first widespread release, it is the translation upon which this edition is based). The stories were an immediate and unqualified success, giving rise to imitations and sequels, and encouraging pirated editions. Contemporary Europe’s fascination with the tales produced a demand for all things Eastern, including spices, textiles, art, jewelry, travel narratives, and literature. The larger-than-life scenarios of the Arabian Nights made the stories and the East synonymous with the opulent or the unbelievable; for example, in 1786 Horace Walpole pronounced a particular legend “more preposterous, absurd, and incredible than anything in the Arabian Nights,” and 134 years later F. Scott Fitzgerald called Jazz Age New York City “a picture of splendor that rivalled the dream cities in the Arabian Nights.” One of the most accessible portals to Middle Eastern culture and daily life, the Arabian Nights—for better or worse—has colored Western perception of the region for centuries.

As Robert Irwin details in “Children of the Nights,” in his The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994; see “For Further Reading”), almost no representation of the Middle East in literature and art, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, can be said to be free of the tales’ influence. From the time of Galland’s translation, the themes, settings, and incidents of the Arabian Nights have appeared in the works of other writers. Eighteenth-century French authors Montesquieu, Diderot, and Voltaire played into the craze for Middle Eastern themes; Voltaire professed to have read the Arabian Nights more than a dozen times. Across the Channel, Joseph Addison retold the stories in The Spectator almost as soon as Galland’s translation appeared. Samuel Johnson set his Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759) in the Middle East. Irwin asserts, however, that it was not until William Beckford composed the Gothic novel Vathek (1786) that a Western author produced an Arabian Nights-inspired fiction of “any real and lasting literary worth.”

Many of the greatest British writers of the early nineteenth century read the stories as children and never forgot them. Friends and collaborators William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge both read the Arabian Nights. Wordsworth mentions the “precious treasure” in “The Prelude” (1805), recounting his childhood wish to save up enough money to purchase a multi-volume set. And several of Coleridge’s greatest poems—“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), “Kubla Khan” (1816), and “Christabel” (1816)—seem influenced by his dark perception of the tales, which gave him nightmares as a child. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, provided a tribute to the stories in “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” (1830), a 154-line poem praising the “golden prime / Of good Haroun Alraschid.” In America, Walt Whitman read the Arabian Nights as a child and later described how he was drawn to the extraordinary tales.

As the novel rose in prominence in the nineteenth century, the Arabian Nights enchanted many writers of fiction. The fantasy stories the Brontë sisters wrote as children showed a strong Arabian Nights influence. Later, the tales are described as reading material for the heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), who domesticates Mr. Rochester in much the same way that Scheherazade pacifies the sultan. In Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), which, like Jane Eyre, was heavily autobiographical, the narrator cites the act of reading as “my only and my constant comfort,” mentioning the Arabian Nights as a particular favorite. Dickens, who as a child actor played scenes from the Arabian Nights in dramatic adaptations, mentioned the stories in many of his novels and letters, and published parodies of the tales in his magazine Household Words. Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1882) is a series of rousing adventure tales inspired by the bold spirit of their predecessors. Across the Atlantic, Washington Irving acknowledged that The Alhambra (1832) was his attempt at “something in the Haroun Al-Rashed style,” and Edgar Allan Poe published “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” (1845).

In the early twentieth century, the Arabian Nights are echoed in a small way in the novels of modernist giants James Joyce and Marcel Proust, and influenced a number of William Butler Yeats’s poems, most notably “The Gift of Haroun Al-Rashid” (1924). The next generation of writers, which included Borges, embarked on perhaps the most sophisticated engagement with the Arabian Nights to date. As Irwin writes, “The Nights is a key text, perhaps the key text, in Borges’s life and work.” Although Borges reworked many stories from the Arabian Nights, notably in the dazzling and playful A Universal History of Infamy (1935), the tales for him transcended what they were for many earlier authors—sources for wild plots or exotic curiosities—and profoundly influenced his structural innovations and views on the nature of storytelling. In Irwin’s words, “Borges found in the Nights precisely what he was hoping to find—doppelgängers, self-reflexiveness, labyrinthine structures and paradoxes, and especially paradoxes of circularity and infinity.” Borges’s fascination with the frame story—a story within which other stories are told—drew him to the tale of a storytelling woman and helped him to reimagine the role and boundaries of fiction.

John Barth explored similar metaphysical issues in Chimera (1972), a dense, difficult novel that features the author communicating with Scheherazade and her sister Dunyazade (Dinarzade in this edition); in the more lucid Tidewater Tales (1987), which features a time-traveling Scheherazade; and in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991). In 2004 Barth again evoked the “Tales of a Thousand and One Nights” with The Book of Ten Nights and a Night, a collection of stories that chronicles the days leading up to and following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Italo Calvino shows an Arabian Nights influence in the structure of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), about a man who discovers that the book he has purchased was incorrectly bound with pages from a novel by a Polish author. Salman Rushdie considers the Arabian Nights in light of contemporary social issues. Focusing not on the architecture of story telling but on the wonder of the tales, Rushdie has woven the Arabian Nights throughout such bubbling, magical, yet politically engaged works as Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988), as well as a set of children’s tales, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).

The final quarter of the twentieth century also produced a number of works that kept closely to the model of the original Arabian Nights. One such work was the highly regarded Arabian Nights and Days (1979), which Nobel Prize-winning author Najib Mahfouz originally composed in Arabic (the English translation, published in 1994, aptly conveys the feel of Arabic literature); the book tells a series of interlinked stories that take place outside the sultan’s palace after Scheherazade finishes her thousand-and-first tale. Indian author Githa Hariharan’s lyrical novel When Dreams Travel (1999) describes Scheherazade’s storytelling epic through multiple points of view, including those of Scheherazade, her sister Dinarzade, the sultan, an unnamed narrator, and a slave girl named Dilshad. Even Arabian Nights scholar Irwin made a foray into fiction based on the stories, with his thriller The Arabian Nightmare (1983).

In recent years, three plays entitled Arabian Nights have been staged. The first, by Tony Award winner Mary Zimmerman, was staged in 1992 by the Chicago-based Lookingglass Theatre Company. American play-wright David Ives spun a tale based on the Scherherazade stories in a short play produced in late 1999 for the Humana Festival in Kentucky. The Nights also inspired British writer Dominic Cooke to create an award-winning play in 1998.

Hundreds of films have been made from the Arabian Nights. Most engage the stories on a superficial level or ignore their substance completely and are content simply to borrow a title and a Middle Eastern setting. A handful of productions, however, stand out for their quality or historical interest. One of the silent era’s most gifted actors, Douglas Fairbanks, based his production The Thief of Baghdad (1924) on the Arabian Nights. A Technicolor film produced by Alexander Korda, also called The Thief of Baghdad (1940) but bearing little resemblance to its predecessor, was one of the great films of its era. In the mid-twentieth century, early special-effects guru Ray Harryhausen produced three films inspired by the Arabian Nights Sindbad tales: The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). The most intellectual and faithful adaptation of the tales was Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Fiore delle mille e una notte (1974), which followed the director’s adaptations of the Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, two other premodern classics that utilize the structure of the frame story.

For many, the best-known adaptation of Scheherazade’s tales is the Disney animated musical Aladdin (1992), to which Robin Williams lent his vocal talents as the Genie. It should be noted, however, that the stories of both Aladdin and Ali-Baba, the two most famous tales attributed to the Arabian Nights, do not exist in any extant Arabic version. Galland learned these tales from a Syrian named Hannâ Diyâb and either believing them to be part of the Arabian Nights canon or simply feeling that they matched the tone of the other stories, he included them in his translation. The popularity of Galland’s volume inextricably linked these “orphan stories” to the originals. In fact, “The History of Aladdin” and “The History of Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers”—perhaps the epic’s most famous tales—were, as it turns out, among the first works to be inspired by the Arabian Nights.