I recently read the coda Ray Bradbury put in later additions of his novel Fahrenheit 451. It made quite an impression and I wanted to share.
You can read the rest here: http://www.cabrillo.edu/~jhancock/coda.html
About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.
But, she added, wouldn't it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women's characters and roles?
A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn't I "do them over"?
Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.
Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story "The Fog Horn" in a high school reader.
In my story, I had described a lighthouse as hav,ing, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a "God-Light." Looking up at it from the view-point of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in "the Presence."
The editors had deleted "God-Light" and "in the Presence."
Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count 'em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?
Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito,out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron's mouth twitch,gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer,lost!
Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like,in the finale,Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been ra,zored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant's attention,shot dead.
Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?
How did I react to all of the above?
By "firing" the whole lot.
By sending rejection slips to each and every one. By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people run,ning about with lit matches.
You can read the rest here: http://www.cabrillo.edu/~jhancock/coda.html