How famous writers revised: first drafts and alternate endings

How famous writers revised is no longer a matter of legend: the drafts sit in libraries, and many can be read online. Jane Austen's cancelled chapters of Persuasion, the crossed-out lines at the end of Dickens's Great Expectations, Siegfried Sassoon's pencil on a Wilfred Owen sonnet and the proofs Fitzgerald rewrote into The Great Gatsby all survive. In almost every case the ending, the title or the length changed, often after another reader saw the draft.

EdCitation publishes this guide. Every story, date and number in it comes from the library or archive that holds the papers, or from the famous authors' own words in print, read on 3 October 2026; three pages could be read only in an archived copy, which is cited. Sayings that cannot be traced are told as unconfirmed, and quotations are kept short.

EdCitation never writes a word of anyone's work, and we hold that line with pride: the revising stays yours. What it does is check. Mechanics QA reads a finished file for formatting and the slips a spell-checker lets through, Find sources finds the criticism an essay on these books needs, and Verify references checks that every source you cite is real.

What drafts show how famous writers revised?

Libraries hold drafts of many of the best-known books and poems in English. These eight are easy to see for yourself, because each holder describes its manuscript on its own pages.

How did Jane Austen and Charles Dickens change their endings?

Both finished a novel, then replaced its last chapters, and in both cases the first ending survives, so the two can be read side by side.

Persuasion: two chapters replaced in the summer of 1816

The only surviving manuscript of Persuasion, Austen's last completed novel, is 16 leaves at the British Library holding chapters 10 and 11 of its second volume (Angerson, 2025; Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts, n.d.). Austen dated them "July 8" at the start and 16 and 18 July 1816 at the end. In this version the couple are reconciled at Admiral Croft's lodgings (Austen-Leigh, 1871/2006), Wentworth taking Anne's hand with the words "my own dear Anne".

The printed ending, written between 18 July and 6 August by Cassandra Austen's memorandum (Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts, n.d.), moves the scene to the White Hart, adds Anne's talk with Captain Harville about constancy, and gives Wentworth his letter (Angerson, 2025). The novel appeared after Austen's death, in December 1817.

The reason comes from family memory. Her nephew's Memoir, whose 1871 edition first printed an edited version of the cancelled chapter, says she thought it "tame and flat" (Austen-Leigh, 1871/2006). The memoir was written more than fifty years later, and the manuscript itself gives no reason.

Great Expectations: the ending Bulwer Lytton talked Dickens out of

Dickens rewrote the close of Great Expectations after the novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton read the proofs and objected to an ending that left Pip a solitary man. Dickens wrote to John Forster that Bulwer had "so strongly urged it" that he made the change, and had put in "as pretty a little piece of writing" as he could (Forster, 1872–1874/2008).

Forster printed the first ending in a note to The Life of Charles Dickens, judging it truer to the tale. In it Pip is walking along Piccadilly with little Pip, a child Estella takes for his, when she calls him to her carriage. Now remarried to a Shropshire doctor, she shakes his hand, and Pip sees that suffering had been "stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching".

Dickens gave the manuscript to Chauncy Hare Townshend in July 1861, and Townshend left it to the Wisbech & Fenland Museum in 1868. The start of the first ending is still there, boxed and crossed through, and the manuscript's last line reads "I saw the shadow of no parting from her but one", the "but one" dropped from the standard text (Wisbech & Fenland Museum, n.d.).

Who else had a hand in famous drafts?

Friends and editors did, and the archives show their handwriting beside the author's.

Frankenstein's notebooks

Mary Shelley drafted Frankenstein in two notebooks, now Bodleian MS Abinger c.56 and c.57. The surviving draft holds 87% of the novel as published in 1818, while only about 12% of the fair copy survives (Shelley-Godwin Archive, n.d.). The archive's online edition marks which words are in Mary Shelley's hand and which in Percy Shelley's. Charles E. Robinson, editor of The Original Frankenstein, finds that Percy deleted many words and added at least 4,000 to 5,000 to the 72,000-word novel, and that the manuscripts show the book was conceived and mainly written by Mary Shelley (Rhodes, n.d.).

Owen's sonnet and Sassoon's pencil

Wilfred Owen wrote "Anthem for Doomed Youth" as a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. A British Library draft, Add MS 43720 f.17, carries pencil alterations by Sassoon made there in September 1917 (Andrew, 2014), and an Oxford draft, one of the Treasures of the Bodleian in 2011, is titled "Anthem for Dead Youth" (Bodleian Libraries, n.d.). Many websites say Sassoon changed "Dead" to "Doomed". The library pages we read do not say which words are Sassoon's, so that detail stays unconfirmed.

The Waste Land's 64 pages

The New York Public Library's Berg Collection holds the only draft of The Waste Land: 64 typed and handwritten pages on assorted papers, which Eliot began in 1914 and guarded for the seven and a half years he worked on the poem. The pages carry his own changes and further comments and revisions by his first wife, Vivien Eliot, and by Ezra Pound. Eliot said the poem began as a "hoard of fragments" (New York Public Library, n.d.).

How much did Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Carver change before print?

A great deal: Fitzgerald rewrote his novel in proof, Hemingway drafted the same ending dozens of times, and Carver's editor cut more than half his words.

From Trimalchio to The Great Gatsby

Princeton University Library holds three stages of The Great Gatsby (Skemer, 2013). The first is two pages of an abandoned start, set in the Midwest around 1885, which survive only because Fitzgerald sent them to Willa Cather. Then comes a 302-page manuscript, finished in France by September 1924, and last the galleys of "Trimalchio", the working title when Scribner's set it in type in 1924. Fitzgerald corrected them in pencil and pasted in long typed additions, and the library says those galleys were "not the same novel" as the one published.

Titles came and went, from "Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires" to "Gold-Hatted Gatsby". By spring 1925 Fitzgerald had settled on "Under the Red, White and Blue", too late: the book had appeared on 10 April as The Great Gatsby, the title his editor, Maxwell Perkins, liked best.

Some 47 endings for A Farewell to Arms

Hemingway told the Paris Review in 1958 that he rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times (Plimpton, 1958); our short story guide gives the rest of his answer. His archive counts higher. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (2016), which holds about 90% of his surviving manuscripts, describes the ending as written and rewritten "in some 47 versions". It also keeps his list of possible titles for "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", among them "The Cult of Violence". A writer's memory of their own revising is a source to check like any other.

Carver, Lish and the 55% cut

In May 1980 Raymond Carver gave his editor, Gordon Lish, the manuscript of a new collection. Lish edited it in two rounds, and its word count fell by 55%. "A Small, Good Thing" went from 37 pages to 12 and became "The Bath"; "Beginners", 33 pages, became the 19-page title story (Stull & Carroll, 2009). On 8 July 1980 Carver wrote to Lish, "I've got to pull out of this one", yet Knopf published the stories on 20 April 1981 as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The typescript, with Carver's typed words under Lish's ink, is at the Lilly Library, and the Library of America's Collected Stories of 2009 restored his text as Beginners.

Did Faulkner say "kill your darlings" or Hemingway "write drunk, edit sober"?

Neither line has been traced to them, so both are told here as unconfirmed, with what can be traced.

• "Kill your darlings." The earliest source found is Arthur Quiller-Couch's Cambridge lecture "On Style", given on 28 January 1914 and printed in On the Art of Writing in 1916. He advised deleting any passage of exceptionally fine writing before the manuscript goes to press: "Murder your darlings" (Quiller-Couch, 1916/2006). Wickman (2013) found that the credit to Faulkner seems to have spread through screenwriting guides in the 1990s.
• "Write drunk, edit sober." O'Toole (2016) found no trace of it in Hemingway's writing. The earliest strong match is in Peter De Vries's 1964 novel Reuben, Reuben, whose poet Gowan McGland says: "Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober".
• "Thirty-nine times." Documented, as Hemingway's own claim; the archive's count of some 47 shows that a true story can still carry the wrong number.

How to revise your own essay the way these drafts show

Revise in passes, from the whole piece down to the file, and keep every version. The steps are our reading of the stories above.

1. Reread the ending first. Austen, Dickens and Hemingway all reworked their endings. Check that yours answers the question your introduction set.
2. Ask one reader, within your course's rules. Bulwer Lytton, Sassoon, Pound and Lish read other writers' drafts, but a marked essay limits outside help: proofreading and editing a dissertation sets out what universities allow.
3. Cut, then check the cut still says what you meant. Carver's letter shows how heavy cutting can change a writer's sense of the work.
4. Settle the title late. Fitzgerald, Owen and Hemingway all tried titles they dropped.
5. Keep every draft. These archives exist because drafts were kept; see writing in your own voice on keeping a dated record of your own.
6. Check it against the brief. EdCitation's free Check your paper reads your instructions into a checklist of word limits, headings, sources and style.
7. Clean the file. Mechanics QA finds comments, tracked changes, placeholders and template text left in it, and Verify references checks the list.

How does EdCitation help with the last revision?

EdCitation is, in our view, the best partner for the final, mechanical pass, because it checks your paper by rule and never writes or rewrites a line of it: as in every draft above, the revising stays the writer's own.

Mechanics QA, for what the file still carries

Dickens's crossed-out lines survive because paper keeps them, and a Word file keeps its comments and tracked changes too, until they are removed. Mechanics QA gives a finished paper a marker's first read, done by rule. It checks font, size, spacing, margins, title page, headings and the reference list against the APA 7 student paper; finds comments, tracked changes, placeholders and template text; matches each citation to the list and looks each reference up in the publisher's record; and flags figures that do not add up or disagree between sections, and the slips a spell-checker lets through. No model reads your paper, and each finding names the rule it broke and the fix. Whether your ending works stays your call, as it was Dickens's. Mechanics QA is part of Pro at $8 a month, and a free account runs three checks a month (pricing); clearing leftovers by hand is covered in our leftovers guide.

Find sources, Cite a source and Verify references, for an essay on these books

Find sources, free, searches about 300 million published works. On 3 October 2026, "Great Expectations original ending" returned 132,416 results. Second was the 2008 Oxford University Press Great Expectations with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and third Jerome Meckier's 1993 article "Charles Dickens's Great Expectations: a defense of the second ending", in Studies in the novel. First was Karl Polanyi's Great transformation of 1944, and most of the top ten used the words in other senses, so add the author's name or search the exact phrase. Cite a source builds a reference from a DOI, title, ISBN or web address in six styles and screens it for retraction, and Verify references marks each entry verified, "check this" or not found, never showing "could not check" as not found. All three are free, with no account.

Quick questions

What was the original ending of Great Expectations?

In Dickens's first ending, Pip meets Estella, remarried to a Shropshire doctor, by chance in Piccadilly; they shake hands and part. Dickens replaced it after Bulwer Lytton read the proofs, and Forster printed it in The Life of Charles Dickens.

How many times did Hemingway rewrite the ending of A Farewell to Arms?

He told the Paris Review thirty-nine times. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, which holds most of his manuscripts, describes some 47 versions.

Who said "kill your darlings"?

Arthur Quiller-Couch, as "Murder your darlings", in a Cambridge lecture of 28 January 1914. The usual credit to William Faulkner seems to date from screenwriting guides of the 1990s.

Did Jane Austen rewrite the ending of Persuasion?

Yes. Her cancelled chapters, dated July 1816, survive at the British Library as Egerton MS 3038, and the printed ending, with Wentworth's letter, replaced them.

Can EdCitation revise my essay for me?

No. EdCitation never writes any part of your work; it checks it. Mechanics QA, in Pro, finds formatting faults, leftover comments and tracked changes, and the slips a spell-checker lets through, and Check your paper reads your brief into a free checklist.

References

• Andrew, J. (2014, March 18). Wilfred Owen: 'The poetry is in the pity'. British Library. https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/wilfred-owen-the-poetry-is-in-the-pity
• Angerson, C. (2025, November 17). Jane Austen at 250. British Library. https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/jane-austen-at-250
• Austen-Leigh, J. E. (2006). A memoir of Jane Austen (2nd ed.). Project Gutenberg. (Original work published 1871) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17797
• Bodleian Libraries. (n.d.). Literature during WWI. WWI primary resource guide. https://libguides.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/c.php?g=423227&p=2890894
• Forster, J. (2008). The life of Charles Dickens. Project Gutenberg. (Original work published 1872–1874) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25851
• Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts. (n.d.). Persuasion: Head note. https://janeausten.ac.uk/edition/ms/PersuasionHeadNote.html
• John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. (2016, April 11). JFK Library presents landmark exhibition on the life and writings of Ernest Hemingway [Press release]. http://web.archive.org/web/20241216185238/https://www.jfklibrary.org/about-us/news-and-press/press-releases/2016-04-hemingway-exhibit-opens
• New York Public Library. (n.d.). T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land with revisions. The Written Word. http://web.archive.org/web/20260930164851/https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/galleries/written-word/item/11243
• O'Toole, G. (2016, September 21). Quote origin: Write drunk, revise sober. Quote Investigator. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/09/21/write-drunk/
• Plimpton, G. (1958). Ernest Hemingway, the art of fiction no. 21. The Paris Review, (18). http://web.archive.org/web/20260913185713/https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway
• Quiller-Couch, A. (2006). On the art of writing. Project Gutenberg. (Original work published 1916) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17470
• Rhodes, J. (n.d.). Mary Shelley's creature lives again. UD Messenger, 17(1). University of Delaware. http://www1.udel.edu/udmessenger/vol17no1/stories/charles_robinson.html
• Shelley-Godwin Archive. (n.d.). Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus. https://shelleygodwinarchive.org/contents/frankenstein/
• Skemer, D. (2013, May 24). Digitization of The Great Gatsby autograph manuscript and galleys. PUL Manuscripts News, Princeton University Library. https://manuscripts.blogs.princeton.edu/2013/05/24/538/
• Stull, W. L., & Carroll, M. P. (2009). Note on the texts [Excerpt]. In W. L. Stull & M. P. Carroll (Eds.), Raymond Carver: Collected stories (pp. 990–998). Library of America. https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Carver_Note_on_Texts_re_Beginners_WWTA.pdf
• Wickman, F. (2013, October 18). Who really said you should "kill your darlings"? Slate. https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/kill-your-darlings-writing-advice-what-writer-really-said-to-murder-your-babies.html
• Wisbech & Fenland Museum. (n.d.). Charles Dickens: Writer of Great Expectations. https://www.wisbechmuseum.org.uk/dickens/