James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Enrique Jardiel Poncela's La Tournée de Dios (1932), Jorge Luis Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963; translated as Hopscotch), and Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) are early examples predating the word "hypertext", while a common pop-culture example is the Choose Your Own Adventure series in young adult fiction and other similar gamebooks, or Jason Shiga's Meanwhile, a graphic novel that allows readers to choose from a total of 3,856 possible linear narratives.
The first hypertext fictions were published prior to the development of the World Wide Web, using software such as Storyspace and HyperCard.
[9][8] Shortly thereafter, in 1997, Mark Amerika released GRAMMATRON, a multi-linear work that was eventually exhibited in art galleries.
More recent works include Stephen Marche's Lucy Hardin's Missing Period (2010)[11] and Paul La Farge’s Luminous Airplanes (2011).
In the 1990s, women and feminist artists took advantage of hypertext and produced dozens of works, often publishing on CD-ROM.
Linda Dement’s Cyberflesh Girlmonster (1995) is a hypertext CD-ROM that incorporates images of women’s body parts and remixes them to create new shapes.
[12][13] Dr. Caitlin Fisher’s hypertext novella These Waves of Girls (2000), mentioned above, is set in three time periods of the protagonist exploring her queer identity through memory.
The story is written as a reflection diary of the interconnected memories of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
In this sense, it is similar to an encyclopaedia, with the reader reading a node and then choosing a link to follow.
In 2013, Steven Johnson, founder of the online magazine FEED, an early publisher of hypertext fiction, wrote an article for Wired detailing why hypertext fiction did not become popular, claiming that non-linear stories are difficult to write, since each section of the work would need to introduce characters or concepts.