It’s a well-known fact that authors, for all their brilliance, can be less than visionary when it comes to coming up with titles. We understand — so much goes into the perfect title, both from an artistic and a commercial point of view, and when you’re so close to the work at hand, we can imagine how it could be a little challenging to see the issue from all angles. But even if a writer is particularly talented at title-penning, the names of books can go through as many permutations as the text itself before they see the light of day. Plus, for good or ill, writers have husbands, wives, publishers and others to weigh in, causing even more changes. Lovers of book trivia, read on: after the jump you’ll find our list of what some classic works were almost called. Check it out and let us know whether you think the changes were for the better or the worse in the comments.
When Jane Austen’s father submitted an early version of her second novel, First Impressions, to a publisher on her behalf, it was rejected. As Pride and Prejudice, it did much better. [via]
Don DeLillo wanted to name his 1985 breakout novel Panasonic, but the corporation’s lawyers protested, and he settled for White Noise. [via]
Once Max Brod got his hands on it, Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared was retitled as Amerika. [via]
Philip Roth’s most famous novel went through incarnations as A Jewish Patient Begins his Analysis before it became Portnoy’s Complaint. [via]
Bafflingly, All’s Well that Ends Well was the original title for Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace — in fact, it was first released under that title until its publishers came to their senses. [via]
Toni Morrison wanted to name her first post-Nobel prize novel War, but instead wound up calling it the wildly dissimilar Paradise. [via]
They Don’t Build Statues to Businessmen was the original title of Jaqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. [via]
Rick Moody, who has described himself as a ‘bad titler,’ eventually changed the title of his novelF.F. to The Ice Storm. Apparently, “F.F.” would have been meant as “short for ‘Fantastic Four’ or a variant of the notation for ‘fortissimo.’” [via]
Trimalchio in West Egg; Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires; On the Road to West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; Gold-Hatted Gatsby; and The High-Bouncing Lover were all titles considered for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. [via]
Adolf Hitler originally wanted to title his book Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice, but ultimately changed it to the much more succinct Mein Kampf. [via]
Ford Maddox Ford wanted to call his novel The Saddest Story — he only suggested calling it The Good Soldier as a joke, but his publisher wasn’t laughing, and took him up on it. [via]
The Last Man in Europe wasn’t commercial enough for George Orwell’s publisher, who suggested they go with 1984. [via]
When William Golding’s first novel was discovered in Faber and Faber’s slush pile, it was calledStrangers from Within. With a little editorial guidance, every American schoolchild now reads it as Lord of the Flies. [via]
In the end, Ayn Rand thought her first title, The Strike, gave too much plot away, and renamed her novel Atlas Shrugged, at the suggestion of her husband. [via]
Tomorrow Is Another Day was the working title of Gone With the Wind, and that’s not the only change we’re grateful for: up until the very last second, Scarlett was named ‘Pansy.’ Bullet dodged. [via]
Bram Stoker considered many titles, one of them being The Dead Un-Dead, before landing on the much less B-filmish Dracula. [via]
When Carson McCullers was twenty-one, she submitted six chapters of her first novel, The Mute, to Houghton-Mifflin. They offered her an advance, renamed the book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and launched her career. [via]
Fiesta, the original title of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, is still used on many foreign editions. [via]
Evelyn Waugh’s The House of the Faith was changed to the much more distinctive titleBrideshead Revisited. [via]
Joseph Heller originally imagined his novel as a Catch-11, but doubled the number to Catch-22so as not to compete with the recently released Ocean’s Eleven. [via]
Alex Haley’s influential 1976 novel was changed from Before This Anger to the much more diplomatic Roots: The Saga of an American Family. [via]
When Harper Lee decided her magnum opus was about more than one character, Atticus becameTo Kill a Mockingbird. [via]
Vladimir Nabokov originally planned on calling his most famous work The Kingdom by the Seabefore it became the Lolita we know and love today. Waste not, want not — Nabokov used a very similar phrase (A Kingdom by the Sea) in his 1974 pseudo-autobiographical novel Look at the Harlequins! as the title of a Lolita-like book written by the narrator. [via]
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s book about the Watergate scandal was originally called At this Point in Time, before it was changed to the more dramatic All the President’s Men. [via]
Stephen Crane’s original manuscript was entitled Private Fleming, His Various Battles, but in an attempt to keep it from sounding like what he considered to be a more traditional Civil War narrative, he renamed it The Red Badge of Courage. [via]
Emily Temple - Nov 11, 2011http://flavorwire.com/230294/25-original-and-rejected-titles-of-classic-books
A Vostok rocket at the Russian Exhibition of Economic Achievement in 1967 It was in February 2000 that I saw a vodka bottle in the shape of a Vostok rocket in the duty free at St. Petersburg airport and found myself suddenly convinced that I had a novel to write about Russia and space
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky Two days later, I learnt about Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: the deaf, provincial Russian school teacher who first showed that it was possible for man to ‘break the shackles’ of the earth
Re-entering the atmosphere – a sketch from Tsiolkovsky’s notebooks Even during the earliest drafts of Konstantin, almost 10 years ago, I was fascinated by Tsiolkovsky’s conviction that it was man’s purpose to replace ‘the natural by what is artificial’ – both literally and metaphorically, to rise above the natural world
The forest near Vyatka by Ivan Shishkin Tsiolkovsky was born in 1857 into a country little changed since the middle ages. The wolf-infested forest, where Konstantin begins, was still a reality for Russians of the 19th century. In the forest, with the extremity of the winters, with the precariousness of the short farming year, nature remained the great adversary
Tsiolkovsky’s 1883 spacecraft And yet, the railway and the telegraph were on the advance. For me at least, it is the collision of technology with a near-medieval culture that makes nineteenth-century Russia so compelling to write about, and Tsiolkovsky – scientist and mystical philosopher, inventor of reaction-propelled, gyroscope-orientated spacecraft as early as 1883 – is that collision embodied
A rocket design from 1914 In 1903, Tsiolkovsky published his paper, ‘The Investigation of World Spaces by Reactive Vehicles’, which describes a viable space rocket – fuelled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. For Tsiolkovsky it was a first step towards his dream of a cosmic future in which, ultimately, mankind would colonise the entire universe
