Proposed Titles for Famous Novels
Incident at West Egg (The Great Gatsby) F. Scott Fitzgerald always found settling on a title for a novel difficult and went through a number of options for his most famous book, including ‘The High-Bouncing Lover’, ‘Under Red, White and Blue’ and this one.
Catch-18 (Catch-22) Joseph Heller wanted the dilemma that gives his classic anti-war satire its name to be Catch-18 but Leon Urisa> had just published a novel called Mila 18a>, set in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Heller’s publishers, keen to avoid confusion, asked him to change the number.
Ba! Ba! Black Sheep (Gone with the Wind) Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War epic could have ended up with this title or with several other options, including ‘Tote the Weary Load’ and ‘Bugles Sang True’. It seems unlikely that it would have been quite so successful if it had been finally published under any of them.
The Sea Cook (Treasure Island) Long John Silver, the cook aboard the Hispaniola, is the most memorable character in the classic adventure story and Robert Louis Stevenson’s original idea was to name the novel for him.
A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis (Portnoy’s Complaint) The opening section of Philip Roth’s famous novel was originally pub- lished in Esquire magazine under this baldly descriptive title and Roth originally intended that the entire work should appear under it.