Some variations of this are
it's lonely at the top but you eat better
and
it's lonely at the top but the view is nice
a look at google ngrams seems to suggest it started to pick up in the 1920's but I don't know where to go after that…
etymologyexpressionsidioms
Some variations of this are
it's lonely at the top but you eat better
and
it's lonely at the top but the view is nice
a look at google ngrams seems to suggest it started to pick up in the 1920's but I don't know where to go after that…
Best Answer
The only reference book I've found that discusses "it's lonely at the top" is Nigel Rees, A Word in Your Shell-like (2004):
A Google Books search turns up very few instances of the phrase in its modern idiomatic sense before the 1950s, though one instance of "lonely at the top" in what appears to be the modern sense dates back to 1924. From Anne Bryan McCall "A Familiar Tower Room Dilemma Discussed," in Woman's Home Companion (1924) [combined snippets]:
A somewhat less exact match appears in Proceedings of the American Transit Claims Association (1927), in a context where being "at the top" is undesirable whether lonely or not:
From "Backstage in Washington" in Outlook and Independent (1930) [combined snippets]:
From an unidentified story by Rosalind Constable in New English Review Magazine (1949) [combined snippets]:
The first Google Books instance of the exact phrase "it's lonely at the top" in its modern idiomatic sense may be from a 1952 issue of Motion Picture magazine, which supposedly contains this entry in its table of contents:
Unfortunately, the linked snippet view doesn't show the relevant excerpt from the magazine, nor is the publication date firm.
The first confirmed Google Books match that I could find for "it's lonely at the top" is in the entry for the actor Aldo Ray in Cleveland Amory, Celebrity Registry: An Irreverent Compendium of American Quotable Notables (1959):
It seems probable that idiomatic usage of "it's [or it is] lonely at the top" has been around since the 1920s at least. But as this Ngram chart for the years 1900–2005 suggests, the phrase's popularity really began to take off right around the time that Randy Newman's mock ode to the self-pity of the successful, "Lonely at the Top," appeared: