We've recently written about inventors who regretted their inventions, as well as directors who cringed at (and even disowned) their own movies. So, we thought we'd share some examples of authors who grew to regret their own titles, too. Here are 23 examples:
1. Arthur Conan Doyle grew to hate Sherlock Holmes, eventually killing his beloved character off.
2. Kafka hated his own writing so much that it seems he wanted some of his books outright burned.
3. A.A. Milne came to resent Winnie The Pooh, because it overshadowed his numerous plays and novels.
4. Ian Fleming didn't like the one James Bond book written from a woman's perspective instead of the spy's (The Spy Who Loved Me).
5. Anthony Burgess called his most famous book, A Clockwork Orange, "a novel [he was] prepared to repudiate" and "a jeu d’esprit knocked off for money in three weeks."
6. Octavia Butler wouldn't let Survivor be reprinted, saying it feels like "really offensive garbage" and accusing it of being full of sci-fi clichés.
7. Annie Proulx wrote Brokeback Mountain, had her letterbox flooded with fanfic and alternate endings, and started to regret putting it out there in the first place.
8. Louisa May Alcott wrote that she "Never liked girls or knew many except my sisters" in her diary when asked to write Little Women.
9. Agatha Christie grew sick and tired of Hercule Poirot, killing him off in the '70s.
10. Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws, regretted the fear of sharks the novel (and subsequent movie) instilled in a lot of readers and viewers.
11. Lewis Carrol was another victim of his own success: he hated being recognised as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
12. P.L. Travers wished her book, Mary Poppins, had never been adapted into a film.
13. Harlan Ellison asked his wife to burn all unpublished copies of his final Dangerous Visions anthology.
14. Stephen King regretted writing Rage, a story he penned under the pseudonym Richard Brachman, after the book became associated with a series of school shootings. King then took the book out of print. The story focused on a student who brought a gun to class.
15. J.G. Bellard, who wrote Crash, disowned The Wind From Nowhere, calling it "a piece of hack work."
16. Alan Moore doesn't regret writing V for Vendetta or Watchmen, but he DOES regret pairing with DC Comics to get them published.
17. In his collection of essays, Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut gave Slapstick a pitiful "D" grade.
18. Karl Ove Knausgaard says his My Struggle series ruined a lot of his relationships.
19. Jeanette Winterson says Boating For Beginners was a cash grab, adding that it might have marred her literary reputation.
20. Leo Tolstoy was pretty hard on his own work, including War and Peace.
21. Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister says he burned Fanshawe and disowned it.
22. Henry James called Washington Square "poorish."
23. William Powell asked for The Anarchist Cookbook, which included instructions on how to create things like tear gas and silencers, to be taken out of print.
Do you have anything to add to this list? Let us know in the comments below!
Share This Article
Comments