Draft titles
Some book titles feel so much a part of their texts that that the works’ draft titles seem like oddly fitted hats, discarded in the dressing room; others — including some forced on authors by their publishers — read like images aspired to but never quite met. And then there are the flat-out clunkers, to be files under “What were they thinking?”
It might be a curious exercise to gather together some of those discarded titles and parade them back out into the light. I can think of a few to get started, though I know I’m forgetting many.
- Catch-18
- Like Water for Hot Chocolate
- Trimalchio in West Egg (The Great Gatsby; one of several discarded titles)
- Ten Little Niggers (And Then There Were None, A. Christie)
- The Snatch (The Moving Target, R. Macdonald)
- Stephen Hero (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
- Slaves (”I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman)
- The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika, Kafka)
- The Sisters (The Rainbow, Lawrence)
- A Paean (”Lenore,” Poe)
- A Prayer (The Power and the Glory, Greene)
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Shown: detail of Joyce’s manuscript of Ulysses, via Anthony Cummins
Posted: April 3rd, 2008 under writing.
Comments: 2
Comments
Comment from dan visel
Time: April 3, 2008, 6:02 am
Maybe a quibble, but Christie’s book was published under the original title in Britain, which makes it a bit more than a “draft title”. I believe the title was changed for the American publication?
Comment from xensen
Time: April 3, 2008, 9:16 am
Thanks, Dan. Yes, the post title is loosely applied. The same is true for a couple other of the examples as well.
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