Old Shame/Literature


 * William Powell, the author of the original Anarchist Cookbook, released a statement on Amazon which expressed his regrets of writing the Cookbook and his desires to take the book out of print. The "recipes" in the Cookbook are outdated and any inevitably futile attempt to replicate the "recipes" contained can result in a hospital visit and possible felony/terrorism charges.
 * H.P. Lovecraft averted this trope by burning virtually everything he'd written when he was young. While notoriously dissatisfied with even his published works throughout his life, this one might've been a good call, as the few fragments which escaped the fireplace probably didn't deserve to.
 * Robert Heinlein's first novel, For Us, the Living, was written around 1939. It was not published, and Heinlein attempted to destroy every copy of it. He failed: it was published posthumously in 2004. Some people think it would have been better had he succeeded. In this case, it was his younger self's politics that he was ashamed of, not his writing.
 * In addition, of the short stories Heinlein published under the pen-name "Lyle Monroe," Heinlein requested that the "stinkeroo three" of "Beyond Doubt," "'My Object All Sublime'," and "Pied Piper" not be reprinted.
 * Terry Pratchett wrote The Carpet People in his non-PC youth. His approach to this Old Shame was to re-write and re-publish it to be in line with his current morals.
 * He also isn't too fond of the first Discworld book, revealed when he confirmed that the completely different Ankh-Morpork Patrician in it is the same character as Vetinari, just "written by someone much less talented."
 * A gem from Thomas Pynchon's introduction to Slow Learner, a compilation of his early short stories: "My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon."
 * Flann O'Brien couldn't find a publisher willing to release his novel The Third Policeman, causing him to believe that it was no good and claim to his friends that he lost the manuscript. It was eventually published the year after his death and went on to become his most popular book.
 * This was George Orwell's attitude toward his novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying and A Clergyman's Daughter, which he wrote for mostly contractual reasons. He also destroyed several unpublished novels he wrote in the 1920's, before he adopted the pen name of "George Orwell" (his real name was Eric Arthur Blair).
 * Nasu Kinoko refuses to re-publish Mahoutsukai no Yoru - Witch on the Holy Night despite fan pleas to do so (since only five copies were ever made), mainly due to embarassment over "bad writing". His feelings about other old works seem to be similar.
 * Stephen King is ashamed of writing the novel Rage (written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) after its connection to several school shootings. It's since been taken out of print.
 * Neal Stephenson was fine with letting his first novel The Big U stay out of print until people started spending hundreds of dollars for copies on eBay. He let it be republished because he felt the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it.
 * At a Sandman convention in 2004, Neil Gaiman was the guest auctioneer for a charity auction. One of the items was his first book ever published, a biography of the group Duran Duran. He grew so embarrassed and ashamed of it while he was on stage that he temporarily passed the auctioneer duties over to Charles Vess because Neil said that there were simply some things that couldn't be sold in good conscience. Vess quickly declared that Neil would sign it if the bidding got over $1,000, which drew quite a horrified reaction from Neil himself. He later remarked that he was a little less ashamed of it after a chance encounter with Simon le Bon, who had exclaimed "Oh, we liked that one!" when Gaiman confessed to having written it.
 * Edward "The Monkey Wrench Gang" Abbey's first novel, Jonathan Troy, was published in 1954 in an edition of 5000 copies; he repudiated it at once, and it has never been reprinted. The cheapest copy currently available at Advanced Book Exchange is priced at $1300.
 * Dr. Seuss was said to have destroyed the majority of his work because he was displeased with it. One notable book that was published posthumously is "Daisy-Head Mayzie," which really wasn't up to par with some of his other work.
 * Before that, he felt so much regret for the racist anti-Japanese cartoons he drew during World War II that he dedicated Horton Hears a Who! to a Japanese friend, writing the story as an allegory for the US occupation of post-WWII Japan.
 * The Spy Who Loved Me was an experiment on Ian Fleming's part. Unlike the other James Bond novels, the book focuses on the Bond Girl. Fleming grew to regret that move. When the producers of the film series sought the rights, he only let them have the name, preferring In Name Only to having it brought to the screen. Interestingly, many Fleming fans consider it one of his best works, in large part because it departs so radically from his typical approach.
 * Philip Pullman states on his website that he hates the first novel he ever wrote and refuses to even name it so people can't track it down. (It's The Haunted Storm.)
 * Lynne Cheney, wife of former US vice-president Dick Cheney, tried to convince the publisher of her 1981 novel, Sisters, not to reissue it in 2006. Given the sexual content (including a lesbian affair) of the book, she was afraid political opponents of her husband would use it to stir up controversy. In the end, The Daily Show ran with it, mostly learning about it from her attempts to keep it secret.
 * Sergej Dowlatov, an emigrant from Russia, forbade all his work made in USSR from being reprinted. He then wrote a novel, Compromiss, to show why (basically all of his previous writing was heavily modified by Soviet censorship).
 * Stanislaw Lem said that his first sci-fi novel, The Astronauts, lacked any value. The shame was not about its being sci-fi, but about its being Communist propaganda. He wrote it for the money.
 * Communist propaganda written just for the money?
 * If written for a state publishing house in a Communist country, it makes sense.
 * Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis, a British design studio who created famous album covers for bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin between the late '60s and the early '80s, deal with this trope imaginatively in their retrospective book For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipgnosis. In the introduction to the (nearly) complete list of their covers at the back of the book, they admit that "There are some designs we would rather like to forget altogether"; within the list, these are marked with an icon of a turkey.
 * Alastair Reynolds included an afterword in Galactic North admitting that his Revelation Space novels are derived in part from a much more space-opera-ish set of unpublished novels which he devoutly intends should never see print, although he regards them as a valuable learning experience.
 * Dean Koontz spent the seventies writing straight science fiction under his real name, and several other genres including romance under various pseudonyms. Since becoming a bestselling author, he has refused to let many of these early novels be reprinted. One of the most infamous of these is The Funhouse, a novelization of a decent but forgettable slasher flick, written under the pseudonym Owen West. The book was so terrible that when he was unable to prevent it from being republished under his real name, he wrote a lengthy introduction decrying how terrible the book is and about how he likes to imagine the life that particular pseudonym took on after its publication ending very violently soon after its completion (namely, trampled by wildebeests while on safari).
 * Orson Scott Card refuses to reprint his short story "Happy Head" in any form, and urges his fans to "think of it as something written by an earnest young graduate student rather than anything I did."
 * Saul Bellow burned the manuscript of his first, unpublished novel The Very Dark Trees and refused to divulge any details about it throughout his life.
 * Nancy Mitford did not allow her third novel, Wigs on the Green, to be republished in her lifetime--partly because the Fascism-praising heroine was based on her sister Unity, who had a self-inflicted bullet lodged in her brain when Germany declared war on the UK, and died a very slow, lingering death.
 * David Eddings - "I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it."
 * Brandon Sanderson apparently once tried to write an epic poem in the style of Beowulf called Wyrn The King- and it was pretty awful. Being self-aware about this, he made the poem an in-universe document in Elantris- as the national epic of the oppresive, theocratic Fjordell Empire.
 * On March 17, 1994, Dave Barry wrote a jocularly profane message to a reporter who wanted to interview him and accidentally wound up posting it to the Usenet group alt.fan.dave_barry instead of sending it by private e-mail. This became legendary around the Internet as the "Chuckletrousers" post. Several days later, the reporter, Michael Bywater, posted to the same newsgroup complaining that he had been forwarded 2,038 copies of the message and didn't want any more. This embarrassing incident is recounted in Dave Barry in Cyberspace.
 * According to anecdote, if you see Harlan Ellison at a signing and innocently present a certain book, he will destroy it and pay you for it.
 * Boston poet Gelett Burgess wrote a poem in 1895 entitled "Purple Cow." Two years later, the poem's popularity prompted him to write a follow up entitled "Confession: and a Portrait Too, Upon a Background that I Rue."
 * Play Dead by Harlan Coben has an author's note in the beginning saying that it's his first novel, written in his early twenties, and also that, if anyone reading the note hasn't read his other books, to put this book back on the shelf in the bookstore and go buy one of them instead.
 * Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote several of these, mostly in The Sixties, with titles like I am a lesbian or My Sister, My Love. Warrior Woman also has a lot of fanservice with lesbians.
 * In 1950 Louis L'Amour was hired to write four novels about the western character Hopalong Cassidy as a tie in with the very popular TV show. Since Hopalong was not an original character, restrictions were placed on him in order to align the books with the TV show. L’Amour was not happy with these stories and later in his career would deny ever writhing them, even to his own family.
 * Mark Gatiss has The King's Men, which is basically gay porn with much purple prose.
 * Highly literary British author Martin Amis was putting together his first big hit, Money, and was running short of cash. So he dashed off Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines - a guide to early arcade games ... a distinctly odd guide to early arcade games. The book is mentioned nowhere in his biography and he doesn't talk about it. Ever.
 * Years after it was published, Salman Rushdie looks back on his 1975 novel Grimus with disgust. The novel (about a Native American who tries to find the secret to eternal life) was critically acclaimed but remained a commercial failure. When asked about it, he said that, since this was his first novel, his writing style was undeveloped and virtually unlike anything he had written afterward.