Examining weather scenes in fiction yields a wealth of deep symbolism and gripping plot devices. Photograph by Harry Gruyaert / Magnum

There are many ways to organize a bookshelf—by author, title, genre, date of publication, color, size—but, prior to writing about the role of weather in literature for the magazine this week, it had never occurred to me to mentally rearrange my shelves by meteorological phenomena. Once I started thinking that way, though, I couldn’t stop. Jane Bennet is thrown into the company of her future husband by a rainstorm; a drought prompts the Joad family to migrate west in “Grapes of Wrath”; a possessed child seems to conjure a storm in “The Turn of the Screw”; the underdressed clerk in Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” likely wouldn’t crave that garment so desperately if winters in St. Petersburg weren’t bitterly cold.

Fictional rain, fictional drought, fictional storms, fictional cold: having wandered into this obsession with imaginary weather, I figured I might as well try to find the most interesting instances of it. Some literary weather events advertise their centrality right up front: the snow in Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow,” the typhoon in Joseph Conrad’s “Typhoon,” the tempest in “The Tempest.” But most fictional weather, like most real weather, is passing. I wanted scenes that were more enduring, either because the writing in them was extraordinary or because they were critical to the plot. I narrowed the scope to novels written for adults, even though that meant losing King Lear on the moor and Bartholomew in the oobleck, not to mention a whole lot of wonderful weather in poetry: T. S. Eliot’s cat-like fog, Wallace Stevens’s “mind of winter,” Emily Dickinson’s snow that “sifts from leaden sieves,” and—the most painful cut—the sublime cold in Auden’s “Elegy for Yeats.” (“The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. / What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day.”) Still, that left entire almanacs’ worth of weather scenes to choose from. With apologies in advance for the many I doubtless forgot, here, in no particular order, are some of my favorite meteorological moments in literature.

1. The hurricane in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes were Watching God.”

The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

In 1928, a hurricane devastated the Florida Everglades—an event that, as fictionalized by Hurston, gave her novel both its title and its central calamity. In the tense hours before the storm strikes, the rabbits and possums and rattlesnakes near Lake Okeechobee begin to flee, while the people in the nearby shantytowns crouch down and wait. First comes the wind, then the rain, then something worse: as Tea Cake, the doomed husband of Janie Crawford, the protagonist, says, “De lake is comin’!” Like Birnam Wood making its way to Dunsinane, a fixed landscape feature has begun to move—an event that should be impossible, and will be tragic.

2. The thunder in Herman Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man.”

Hark, what Himalayas of concussions!

Thunder in literature is mostly figurative; characters, angry or imperious, thunder their lines all the time. But of its various literal appearances—from the cosmic game of ninepins in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” to the “dry sterile thunder without rain” in T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”—I like none so much as this line from a little-known Melville story. It is spoken by a lightning-rod salesman, out hawking his wares in the middle of a storm, to try to terrify a potential customer into an impulse purchase. As such, it is both histrionic and comic—yet for all that, it remains a terrific description of thunder. For just a moment, sound waves solidify, and the world’s most foreboding mountains reverberate in the sky.

3. The lightning in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.”

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three …

I have sung the praises of this phrase before, as the greatest parenthetical aside in literature. So perhaps I should have looked elsewhere for an exemplary lightning bolt, but to my knowledge there is none finer in all of fiction. (I exclude, on the grounds that it is only a simulacrum, Harry Potter’s scar.) Nabokov’s lightning is mimetic: like the real thing, it flashes down into the middle of the sentence out of nowhere—swift, supercharged, brilliant.

4. The mud in Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House.”

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

Dickens’s novel is best known for its fog, which throws London into the same state of murky obscurity as the British legal system. But I am a partisan of its mud, which flows down every thoroughfare, squelches around every boot, saddles the poor street-cleaner Jo with a Sisyphean task, and, best of all, provides the excuse for a Megalosaurus to lumber across the book’s opening paragraph—the first sighting of such a creature in England in a hundred and sixty-six million years, and the weirdest walk-on in all of Victorian literature.

5. The cyclone in Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila.”