The Great Lost Literary Works
 

I recently found myself discussing War of the Worlds with willravel. We found ourselves contemplating the possibility that Wells had originally intended the Martians to win the war. This conclusion is supported by the deus ex machina ending; it seems as though Wells, faced with altering the ending to allow humanity to triumph needed a device that would defeat the technologically superior Martians.

This got us to wondering what other great literature may have been changed due to social pressure. Did Salinger originally intend for Holden to run away with Phoebe? Perhaps for them to become aan unstoppable pair, smiting phonies throughout the land? It's known that Dickens had originally intended Pip to lose Estella. What other works did he change? Maybe Scrooge had originally been intended to conclude that the spirits were the result of some bad seafood and fire Cratchett to be able to afford the top shelf stuff. Who knows what great literature may have been lost due to critical pressure?

Discuss.

EDIT - For grammar.

It seemed as if there was a massive change of direction by Wells in WoW (War of the Worlds, not World of Warcraft), and that disease seemed an odd way to end things. I'm with Martian in that I was rooting for the invaders.

I worry about what level of creative control authors are allowed to have in their works. And then you look at works by greats like Dickens, as Martian said above, and you think, "What would his unaltered works have been like?". Had Pip Lost Estella (which is brilliant), it would have given the whole story a different flavor. It would have been more like the end of Tale of Two Cities.

Now that I think of it, there are a few novels that I'd like to see better endings for, like To Kill a Mockingbird or Lord of the Flies. If all those kids died, I would have actually been a bit more satisfied that I just read something that wasn't coddling me in the end.

These are all hindsight suggestions. Presumably, you like the books even in their original form. How do you know you would have liked them as you did when you first read them if they had different endings? How do you know the book would have been sufficiently well received in the author's time period for you to know about it today?

There's no way to know. The question, at least to me, is about what the pure work of art would have been, just coming straight from the soul of the author. No considerations for the reader, no corrections to appease the masses.

That makes some more sense. I don't know if I've ever really thought about it. I suppose that quite a few authors faced that challenge of not being able to produce what they really want to produce. Related to that, I wonder what kind of poetry Dickinson would have produced had she known that most of her poems would be published one day.

Naturally, they are. It's just speculation; unfortunately, we can't ask Dickens if he had originally planned for Oliver Twist to swing with Fagin, or if Hemingway had originally intended to kill off Santiago at the end of The Old Man and the Sea.

The conversation arose from the observation that certain works seem to have a fairy-tale happy ending tacked on and that these endings are less satisfying. It does seem in many cases that authors may have gone that route for the greater social acceptance afforded a happy ending; this naturally leads to the question of 'what would they have written otherwise?'