Riot Headline The Best Books of 2024
Classics

5 Books with Awful Original Titles

Johann Thorsson

Staff Writer

Johann Thorsson is a native of Iceland, but spends much of his time in Bookland. He has lived in a few parts of the world but currently lives in Iceland with a pretty woman and a mischievous son who resembles Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) more each day. He has a complicated but ultimately useless degree in bioinformatics from a very pretty college in England. His favorite books are 1984, Flowers for Algernon and The English Patient. He hopes one day to call himself a writer without feeling like he's just fooling himself. Blog: Johann Thorsson - On Book and Writing Twitter: @johannthors

The great Sol Stein has this to say about titles in his excellent Stein on Writing:

Venture into any bookstore and look at the titles of new novels on display. Take note of your reaction to the titles of books by authors you don’t know. You’ll see how many book’s don’t tempt you to pick them up because of their titles, and which titles intrigue you enough to want to take them down off the shelf and read the flaps.

However, as good as some of the books are, a few of the books we now call “classics” had awful, awful titles at first, showing that even the finest of writers have problems giving names to their books. My personal favorite titles are I am Legend, The Stars My Destination, and Dune. But let’s take a look at some great books that were almost published with different, truly bad titles.

5 Books With Awful First Titles

The Great Gatsby was originally supposed to be called… (wait for it)

Gatsby

Not so great.

Gone with the Wind was to be called:

Gone With The Wind

Sounds…. 50-Shades naughty.

A Moveable Feast had another, quite silly, title at the time Hemingway died. His widow fixed that right up, by using a title from another manuscript. And what was the original title?

moveable-feast

Hemingway seems to have been bad at coming up with titles. One of his books kept changing names, and before it was ultimately published as A Farewell to Arms, the book was to be called:

FareWell to Arms

And finally, Faulkner’s great book, possibly the best-titled book of all time, The Sound and the Fury was originally supposed to be called…

Twilight

_________________________

Sign up for our newsletter to have the best of Book Riot delivered straight to your inbox every two weeks. No spam. We promise.

To keep up with Book Riot on a daily basis, follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook. So much bookish goodness–all day, every day.