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Originally Posted by pidgeon92
What makes an official version, anyhow? Look at what happened to The Picture of Dorian Gray ( via Wikipedia). . . . |
There's nothing wrong with publishing multiple (but correct) versions of a book, esp. one that has been edited by the author over time. Everyone has their favorite version of
Leaves of Grass, for example, and critics generally agree that the original version of
Confessions of an English Opium Eater is superior to De Quincey's expanded (and some would say distended) revised edition.
Richard Wright's autobiography/bildungsroman
American Hunger (a/k/a
Black Boy) was, in the original published edition, butchered and bowdlerized by editors who censored it for sexual and political reasons, even removing the second half ("The Horror and the Glory") for fear of offending the communists whom Wright excoriated. At this point, there's little reason for me to read the original Book of the Month Club edition, but a critic or interested reader might find it instructive to compare to the restored edition to see exactly which bits were deemed unacceptable.
Personally, I'm a fan of variorum editions when the edited and original texts prove equally interesting. Some writers revise to accentuate their own mannerisms at the expense of prose that was a tad ostentatious to begin with (Firbank); others erase their personalities in the interests of becoming more readable or close to the character (Flaubert).
Certain writers, however, actually replace one exquisite choice with another they later deem more apt. One of the most fascinating exhibits I've ever seen was shown at the late Donnell Library in NYC: handwritten revisions to manuscripts by Nabokov and Yeats. Nabokov seemed a master of improving on perfection.