Every classic started as a manuscript somebody might have thrown away. A publisher's niece saved Little Women. A friend ignored Kafka's instructions to burn everything. A suitcase went missing at a Paris station and took a young Hemingway's early work with it. These are the writers, the books, the characters, and the near misses behind the shelf everyone recognizes.
Every tile in a Classic Literature game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Authors
nine stories
1The novelist who fought at Lepanto
On the tile: Cervantes1571
Before he wrote a word of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes was a soldier. At the sea battle of Lepanto in 1571 he was burning with fever, yet he fought from the bow of his galley. He took two shots to the chest, and a third wound left his left hand useless for the rest of his life. The first part of Don Quixote was still more than thirty years away.
The man who wrote The Three Musketeers grew up on stories about his father, and the stories were true. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was born in 1762 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the son of a French nobleman and an enslaved woman, and under colonial law he was born into slavery. His father had gone back to France without him and sent for him in 1776. Because he was mixed race the army would not take him as an officer, so he enlisted at the bottom and rose to general of division.
In the summer of 1816 Mary Godwin, eighteen years old, was staying near Lake Geneva with the poet Percy Shelley and their neighbor Lord Byron. The weather was wretched and the party was stuck indoors for days. Byron proposed a competition: each of them would write a ghost story. She remembered his exact words years later, and hers was the story that grew. It was published two years after that soaked summer as Frankenstein.
In 1846 Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë paid to print a book of poems as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Each kept her own initial and took the same invented surname. Charlotte later explained the choice: they had a scruple about taking names that were plainly masculine, but they did not like to declare themselves women either, because authoresses were liable to be looked on with prejudice. The book sold almost nothing. Jane Eyre appeared the next year, by Currer Bell.
Louisa May Alcott is remembered for a warm book about four sisters. She also wrote lurid thrillers, full of revenge and disguise and opium, under the name A. M. Barnard, and kept that work clear of her family's name. Nobody put the two together until the 1940s, when the scholars Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern turned up a letter from a Boston editor, addressed to Miss Alcott, about stories signed A. M. Barnard.
When Herman Melville died in New York in September 1891, the New York Times obituary ran a few lines. It called him the author of Typee, Omoo, Mobie Dick, and other sea-faring tales, misspelling the book now counted among the great American novels and adding that these were written in earlier years. His last novel had come out more than three decades before. By then his readers had moved on.
Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835, about two weeks after Halley's Comet swung closest to the sun. In 1909 he told his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, that he had come in with Halley's Comet, that it was due again the next year, and that the Almighty had no doubt decided these two unaccountable freaks, having come in together, must go out together. He died on April 21, 1910, the day after the comet again passed closest to the sun.
Edith Wharton grew up inside the New York society she later took apart on the page. She knew its rules from the inside: which families called on which, which marriage could not be undone, which silence was the polite one. The Age of Innocence sets a love story against those rules and lets the rules win. In 1921 the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and Wharton became the first woman to win it.
Franz Kafka spent his last years trying to have his own work destroyed. He left a note in late 1921 and clearer instructions in 1922, telling his friend Max Brod to burn every paper and manuscript after his death. Kafka died in June 1924, and Brod ignored him, editing the unfinished novels and publishing them instead. When the German army closed on Prague, Brod caught one of the last trains out of the city, carrying Kafka's papers in a suitcase. People still argue about whether he was right.
Long before Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe, a woman at the Japanese imperial court wrote a long prose story about a nobleman named Genji, his loves, and his descendants. Murasaki Shikibu composed The Tale of Genji in the eleventh century, more than three centuries before Chaucer wrote in English. Many scholars call it the first novel in the history of world literature. The Heian court that produced it was one of the great periods of Japanese writing.
The first part of Don Quixote appeared in 1605 and was read across Europe. In 1614 someone calling himself Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda published an unauthorized second part. The name was false, and nobody has ever proved who was behind it. Cervantes, who had been slow with his own continuation, finished it the following year, and the true second part was printed in Madrid in 1615. He died a few months after that, in 1616.
In 1797 Jane Austen's father wrote to a London publisher offering a manuscript called First Impressions. It came back refused by return of post. Austen reworked the book over the next fifteen years, gave it a new title, and sold it outright to Thomas Egerton, who paid 110 pounds for the copyright. Pride and Prejudice appeared in 1813. Because she had sold the rights instead of sharing the profits, she earned nothing more from it, however many copies it sold.
By 1831 Notre-Dame de Paris was in such poor condition that demolition was being discussed. That year Victor Hugo published a novel named after the building and made the cathedral itself one of its characters. The book was an immediate success and turned the state of France's old buildings into a public argument. Restoration began in 1844 under the architects Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugene Viollet-le-Duc and ran, with a long pause for lack of money, until 1864. The cathedral was listed as a historic monument in 1862.
Moby-Dick came out in London first, on October 18, 1851, under the title The Whale, and the publisher left out the epilogue in which Ishmael explains how he survived the wreck. British reviewers were handed a story told in the first person in which everyone aboard dies, and the Spectator ridiculed the book for exactly that. The American edition followed on November 14, epilogue intact, under the title Melville wanted.
Harriet Beecher Stowe wanted Northern readers to feel what the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 meant for the people it hunted, so she wrote sketches of enslaved families being separated. They ran as a serial in an antislavery Washington paper, the National Era, from June 1851 to April 1852. The first book edition appeared in March 1852 and sold more than three hundred thousand copies in its first year, making it the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century.
Anna Sewell fell at fourteen and damaged both ankles, and for the rest of her life she could not stand without a crutch or walk any distance. She wrote one book, at the very end of that life. Black Beauty, told in the voice of a horse, was published in Norwich by the local firm Jarrold's on November 24, 1877. Sewell died the following April, five months later.
Jules Verne sent Phileas Fogg around the world in eighty days, and in 1889 a reporter set out to do better. Nellie Bly sailed from Hoboken Pier aboard the Augusta Victoria on November 14, traveling for the New York World. In England she learned that Verne wanted to meet her, so she went on to Amiens, where he asked where she planned to stop. Her train pulled into Jersey City at 3:51 in the afternoon on January 25, 1890, seventy-two days, six hours, and eleven minutes later.
Upton Sinclair wrote his novel about the immigrants who worked in Chicago's packinghouses, meaning to make readers care about them. Readers cared instead about what was going into the meat. The Food and Drug Administration credits the conditions Sinclair captured in The Jungle as the final precipitating force behind both a meat inspection law and a comprehensive food and drug law, and President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Food and Drugs Act on June 30, 1906.
The story goes that Daniel Defoe built Robinson Crusoe out of one real castaway. Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor, quarreled with his captain and was put ashore in October 1704 on an uninhabited island in the Juan Fernandez group, hundreds of miles off Chile. He lived there alone for four years and four months until a passing ship took him off in February 1709. Defoe's novel appeared in 1719, and its island lies off the east coast of South America, not the west. Selkirk was only one of the survival accounts Defoe could have known.
In 2010 an archivist at Tate worked through the handwritten memoirs of Henry Sibson, a British sculptor employed on repairs to Notre-Dame in the 1820s. Sibson described a carver named Trajan and the government sculptor above him, a man who was humpbacked and did not like to mix with the carvers, nicknamed Le Bossu. Hugo lived in the same part of Paris and took a keen interest in the cathedral's nineteenth-century restoration. Nothing proves the connection, but the seven volumes had been sitting in a house in Penzance, in Cornwall.
The Pickwick Papers began badly. The monthly parts were moving about a thousand copies, and the young writer producing them was not yet Charles Dickens the institution. Then, in the tenth chapter, Mr. Pickwick met the boots at the White Hart Inn, a servant named Sam Weller who talked in a way nobody had put on a page before. Sales climbed to twenty thousand a month within a year and reached forty thousand by the late autumn of 1837.
Before Melville invented Moby Dick, Pacific whalers traded stories about a pale sperm whale they called Mocha Dick. The story goes that he was first seen in 1810, was pursued by more than a hundred whalers, and was not killed until 1838, though nearly all of it traces to a single account the explorer J. N. Reynolds published in The Knickerbocker in 1839. Melville signed on to the whaler Acushnet in December 1840, and the name he later gave his own white whale is hard to hear as a coincidence.
William Ernest Henley had tuberculosis of the bone from the age of twelve, and before he was twenty it cost him his left leg below the knee. In 1873 he went to Edinburgh to put the other foot in Joseph Lister's hands, and in the infirmary he met a young writer named Robert Louis Stevenson. They became close friends. In May 1883, still waiting on the proofs of Treasure Island, Stevenson wrote to him: "It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot John Silver in Treasure Island."
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland began as a story told aloud to a child who then wanted it on paper. Lewis Carroll made Alice Liddell a handwritten book with thirty-seven of his own pen-and-ink drawings and a colored title page, and gave it to her as an early Christmas present on November 26, 1864. She sold it at auction in 1928 for fifteen thousand pounds. It is in the British Library now.
Captain Nemo's past is left deliberately vague in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, and the vagueness was his publisher's idea. As Verne first conceived him, Nemo was a Polish aristocrat whose family had been killed by Russian troops after the failed uprising of 1863, and who took his revenge on Russian warships. Pierre-Jules Hetzel refused the character, with France's political ties to Russia in mind, and Verne gave way. What survives is a man with no country and no explanation.
For a while Bram Stoker's vampire was called Count Wampyr, and the story was set in Styria. On August 8, 1890, on holiday in Whitby, Stoker walked into the public library and found William Wilkinson's 1820 account of Wallachia and Moldavia. A footnote told him that Dracula in the Wallachian language meant Devil, and that the name had been given to anyone conspicuous for courage, cruelty or cunning. He wrote it down. The book appeared seven years later.
J. M. Barrie was asked to sit on a committee raising money for a children's hospital in London. He declined, and said he hoped to find another way to help. Two months later the board of Great Ormond Street Hospital learned what he had meant: he had given the hospital the rights to Peter Pan. Every performance of the play in the United Kingdom still supports the hospital's work.
Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in about six weeks, under financial pressure, and it was published on December 19, 1843. The first edition sold out by Christmas Eve, and by 1844 the book had gone through thirteen printings. He made very little from the early editions. Dickens had been fussy about the binding and the endpapers, and the price of those materials took a large share of what he might have earned on each copy.
Great Expectations first ended with Pip and Estella meeting briefly in London, four years after his return from abroad, and then separating. Dickens showed the proofs of that concluding chapter to his friend the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who thought the ending too disappointing for readers and argued for one that left the two of them together. Dickens put the first version aside and wrote another. The book now ends with Pip taking Estella's hand, the two of them walking out of the ruined place, and Pip seeing no shadow of another parting from her.
Two thousand copies of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland were printed in 1865. John Tenniel objected that the illustrations showed through the page, and Lewis Carroll, who was paying for it himself, recalled the edition and had it done again. The sheets were not thrown away. Macmillan sold them to D. Appleton of New York; they were bound in London with an 1866 title page and shipped across the Atlantic. Twenty-three of the copies Carroll issued in 1865 survive. Only one was bound in white vellum, and that one went to Alice Liddell.
Louisa May Alcott had no appetite for writing a book for girls. Asked for one anyway by her publisher, Thomas Niles, she wrote in her journal that she plodded away without enjoying the work and had never liked girls or known many, except her sisters. Niles found the first chapters dull. He showed them to his young niece, who laughed and loved the antics of the four daughters, and that was enough to keep the project alive. Little Women remade what a book for girls could be.
Auguste Maquet was a trained historian. He worked with Alexandre Dumas on subjects and plot outlines and supplied the preliminary drafts Dumas revised into final form, among them The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. The books went out under Dumas's name alone, though Dumas named him in an open letter to the Societe des Gens de Lettres in 1845. In the 1850s Maquet took him to court for unpaid fees and for recognition as coauthor. He won 145,200 francs, payable within eleven years, and lost the authorship claim.
Fyodor Dostoevsky had taken 3,000 roubles from the publisher Stellovsky to hold off his creditors. The terms: deliver a new work of at least 160 pages by November 1, 1866, or Stellovsky would take the rights and the income to everything Dostoevsky had written and would write for the next nine years. With four weeks to go he hired a twenty-year-old stenography student, Anna Snitkina, and dictated The Gambler to her. They made the deadline. Eight days after he finished, he proposed to her, and she accepted.
On a rainy afternoon at Braemar in Scotland in 1881, Robert Louis Stevenson drew a map of an island to entertain his stepson Lloyd. He colored it in, and then he could not leave it alone. He wrote later that the shape of it took his fancy beyond expression, and that he ticketed his performance Treasure Island. The characters turned up on the map before they reached the page, and the first fifteen chapters came in about as many days.
In December 1922 Hadley Richardson packed a valise with everything her husband had in progress and set off to join him in Switzerland. She took the originals and the carbon copies both, so that he could work over the holiday. At the Gare de Lyon in Paris the valise was stolen. Writing to Ezra Pound a month later, Ernest Hemingway said that all that remained of his complete works were three pencil drafts of a poem he had scrapped, some correspondence, and some journalistic carbons. None of it was recovered.
Through draft after draft of Margaret Mitchell's Civil War novel, the heroine was named Pansy O'Hara. Mitchell changed the name while revising the manuscript, late in the process. The book came out in 1936 at 1,037 pages, sold for three dollars, and moved more than a million copies in its first six months. It is difficult now to picture that character answering to anything but Scarlett.