Creator Backlash / Literature

• In-Universe in Magpie Murders. Alan Conway is an author who once hoped to be a great man of letters writing serious literature. He wrote a few books like that and nobody cared, so he instead tried his hand at ripping off Agatha Christie and writing a detective story—and he became a best-selling author of detective stories. Conway remains deeply embarrassed by and contemptuous of his murder mysteries even as he cranks out best-seller after best-seller.
• Gelett Burgess was so exasperated over the popularity of his fluff 1895 poem "The Purple Cow" that he eventually wrote... a retaliatory poem.

  The Purple Cow

  I never saw a Purple Cow,
  I never hope to see one;
  But I can tell you, anyhow,
  I'd rather see than be one.

  Retaliation

  ''Ah, yes, I wrote the "Purple Cow"—
  I'm Sorry, now, I wrote it;
  But I can tell you Anyhow
  I'll Kill you if you Quote it!
• The Cat Who... Series: Discussed in-universe, late in book #28 (The Cat Who Dropped a Bombshell), when Qwill, Polly, Arch and Mildred are talking and Qwill brings up Gelett Burgess, then recites the man's retaliatory poem saying how much he was annoyed by the popularity of his fluff 1895 poem "The Purple Cow".
• Arthur Conan Doyle grew to resent Sherlock Holmes, who overshadowed all of his other writings, so he killed him off in The Final Problem (as we all know by now). Unfortunately for Doyle, he suffered such a staggering amount of fan backlash (including from his own mother) that when Punch offered him an equally staggering sum to return to writing the character, he relented (as we also all know by now). He never really got over having to keep writing Sherlock Holmes stories, and his attitude is best exemplified by a letter he sent to a friend after writing The Final Problem:
  "Holmes is dead and damned! I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards paté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day."
• Agatha Christie came to hate her most famous character, the fictional detective Hercule Poirot. By 1960, she had been resenting him for many years, and famously described him as a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep." She never stopped writing Poirot stories, though, as she considered it a duty to give the public what they wanted, but she was not above skewering the character in later years (usually through her Author Avatar, mystery writer-turned-detective Ariadne Oliver). Poirot did get killed off in Curtain, but that one was written during the Blitz and Christie reasoned that, were she to die, she may as well Torch the Franchise and Run. After the war, she refused to have Curtain published until shortly before her death. In particular, her Poirot novels The Big Four and The Mystery of the Blue Train were among her least favourites. She wrote them around the time of her famed disappearance and subsequent divorce in order to fulfill the terms of her publication contract, and it's clear that her heart wasn't in it. The former was more or less a set of incomplete short stories strung together with a loose overarching plot, while the latter was little more than an Adaptation Expansion of the short story "The Plymouth Express".
• Michael Crichton intended for his 1990 novel Jurassic Park to be a standalone work. However, he was more than happy with it being adapted into a film, selling the book's film rights before it was published and helping to write the film's screenplay. Once the film was a massive financial success, its creators began pressuring Crichton to write a sequel, despite the fact that he had never franchised any of his work. He reluctantly agreed, publishing The Lost World in 1995, which retcons a lot of plot points from Jurassic Park. Its film adaptation and second sequel Jurassic Park III were created with no involvement with Crichton whatsoever.
• Alan Garner had strong critical disdain for his first two fantasy novels, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963). He considered them jejeune and childish next to his more evolved later work. However, fans loved them and kept badgering for a sequel to tie up the loose ends. He forced himself to write the sequel Boneland in 2013, some fifty years after the two original books. Deliberately, the style is as unlike the first two books as possible.
• Ian Fleming was so unhappy with The Spy Who Loved Me that he attempted to suppress it where he could. He blocked a British paperback edition (it was only published after his death) and only gave permission for the title to be used when he sold the film rights — which is why the movie is so very different, to the point where it had its own Novelization. Towards the end of his life, Fleming even denounced most of his James Bond novels as "trivial piffle" and the title character a "cardboard dummy".
• A. A. Milne grew to loathe the Winnie the Pooh series, as it typecast him forever as a "writer of children's books" and prevented him from going back to writing adult fiction. He even tried to kill off Pooh at the end of the second book. (It didn't work.) Pooh's illustrator E.H. Shepard also suffered from this, as it overshadowed his work in political cartoons. And Milne's son Christopher Robin was so angered at being immortalized in the books (and the bullying it led to) that he accused his father of exploiting him.
• Lillian Moller Gilbreth didn't like Cheaper by the Dozen or Belles on Their Toes, which her children wrote, because they made her and her husband's life's work look silly.
• Peter Llewelyn Davies is forever known as the basis for J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Davies hated being associated with "that terrible masterpiece" and it is believed that's what drove him to alcoholism and suicide.
• Stephenie Meyer claims that she is "so over" The Twilight Saga, saying that it is "not a happy place to be" for her. In particular, she's tired of it constantly overshadowing her more recent works. When asked if she'd ever return to the series, Meyer replied, "Not completely. What I would probably do is three paragraphs on my blog saying which of the characters died."
• Stephen King has written many things, not all of which he remembers fondly:
  • He came to regret writing Rage (1977) because someone decided to make life echo art — even though art, in this case, involves students killing teachers. Current copies of The Bachman Books no longer feature Rage for that reason. Oddly, the short story "Cain Rose Up" can still be found in Skeleton Crew despite dealing with similar subject matter (perhaps it's different because the killer isn't treated as sympathetically).
  • He admitted in his book On Writing to not being too fond of Insomnia and Rose Madder, since he actually plotted them out but found them to be "stiff, trying too hard" novels. In fact, the only plotted novel of his that he likes is The Dead Zone.
  • He doesn't like Dreamcatcher, saying he wrote it while he was high on oxycontin.
  • He has expressed similar disdain for his science fiction tome The Tommy Knockers. It was the last book he wrote before kicking a serious cocaine habit and he believes that his addiction was starting to show in his writing. He's referred to it as an "awful book" and that "within its 700 plus pages there's a potentially good 300-page novel." Fans tend to agree.
  • He admits to not liking Pet Sematary in the book's introduction, finding it too bleak, nihilistic, and grim, expressing a hopeless view of the world that he doesn't really believe. He only agreed to publish it to get out of a contract. It's a case of Magnum Opus Dissonance, as many readers like the bleakness and consider it his most effective "straight" horror novel. (King is willing to concede that he thinks it's damn effective as a scary story.)
  • King also showed no love for his "trunk novel" Blaze in an appearance before the National Press Club. He called it "an absolutely terrible novel," and speculated that publishing it instead of 'Salem's Lot might have derailed his career before it got started (this was long before he revised Blaze and published it under his pseudonym Richard Bachman).
  • In addition, don't expect to ever read his earliest novels The Aftermath (written when he was just 16) or Sword in the Darkness, unless you pay a visit to the Special Collections section of the student library at the University of Maine at Orono.
• Jack Kerouac found Visions of Cody to be a superior work to On the Road, and was disappointed at how much more people focused on the latter.
• In the introduction to a rerelease of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess called it "pornographic" and said the main reason for reading it would be for the "raping and ripping." He was particularly outspoken against the film adaptation, though he was not involved in its creation.
• Samuel Richardson actually insulted his work Clarissa in the prologue of one of the later volumes, saying the main character was dull and not understanding how anybody enjoyed the work. He later picks apart the morals in Clarissa in another of his works.
• Mark Twain came to think of Tom Sawyer as the exemplar of everything that's shallow and stunted in the American spirit. His disgust found its way into Huckleberry Finn, in which Tom comes off as more of a thoughtless Jerkass than a mischievous scamp. The frequently cash-strapped Twain did, however, work his most famous character into two more books afterwards.
• Western author Louis L'Amour early in his career was hired to write a series of stories about the character "Hopalong" Cassidy for a Western pulp magazine. The stories were not about an original character and were extensively edited to tie in with a "Hopalong" Cassidy TV show. L'Amour later in life denied ever writing them in the first place, even to his own family. They were only reprinted after his death.
• Anne Rice, for a time, disclaimed her popular Vampire Chronicles series, as well as the connected Mayfair Witches series, due to converting to Christianity, though she later recanted this view after she denounced religion.
• Isaac Asimov:
  • Dr. Asimov was troubled by the idea that "Nightfall" was widely considered his best work. This was partly because it was one of his earliest works (he wrote it when he was 21), so the notion that it was his best story suggested that he hadn't improved as an author in 50 years of writing. One of the most-remembered paragraphs from that story isn't even his work; it was added by editor John W. Campbell.
  • One of the reasons that it took 30 years for the fourth Foundation book to come out was that he was tired of the series. The main thing that got him to work on Foundation's Edge was the boatload of cash he was offered.
• Stephen Crane believed that the best way of writing was to go experience something, then dash off your thoughts rapidly and without editing, while being careful not to go on too long. For reasons uncertain to biographers (a bet may have factored into it), he decided to write The Red Badge of Courage based on nothing he'd ever seen, heavily edited, and by his own admission "too long". Naturally, "the damned Red Badge" made him famous, while not necessarily helping to dispel his conviction that Readers Were Morons.
• Peter S. Beagle:
  • He called A Fine and Private Place (his first novel, and fairly well received) his "state of grace" novel, suggesting he must have been protected by whatever spirit watches over young and self-important authors.
  • Double example with The Last Unicorn, whose popularity has overshadowed a lot of Beagle's work, and questions about a sequel have increasingly annoyed him. He's finally going to give in, though, so he can't hate it that much...
• Shocked by the conditions in which Dust Bowl refugees lived, John Steinbeck wrote a satire, L'Affaire Lettuceberg. He decided, however, that it would be better not to publish it, because it was to "cause hatred through partial understanding" and he preferred "making people understand each other." Reconsidering the subject, he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, a much more direct and passionate work.
• Akiyuki Nosaka can't even re-read Grave Of The Fireflies because he hates it so much. It seems to be related to Survivor Guilt, given that the ending of the story wasn't quite the same as the way his life turned out.
• Upton Sinclair was severely upset that the only thing about The Jungle that stuck with America was the horrific conditions of the meatpacking industry, as opposed to the socialist Author Tract that took up most of the book.
  "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
• Arthur C. Clarke came to dislike Rescue Party due to so many fans preferring it to what he wrote later in his career.
• Lucy Maud Montgomery was sick of her most famous work, Anne of Green Gables, by the time she wrote its sequel. The creation of Emily Starr was a direct result of her own disillusionment with her work, though she went on to put out eight books in the Anne series anyway (the last two books relegate Anne to supporting character status). In addition, the series was written out of order, which meant that the last book she wrote wasn't Rilla of Ingleside, which ends the series, but Anne of Ingleside. By then she was thoroughly tired of writing Anne.
• Henry James grew to dislike Washington Square, mostly because of the comparisons it got to the works of Jane Austen.
• J. R. R. Tolkien grew to somewhat resent The Lord of the Rings - not because of the work itself, but because of the extreme obsessiveness of its fans, saying they were "involved in the stories in a way that I'm not" and referring to them as "my deplorable cultus". He also resented that his publishers demanded a sequel to The Hobbit rather than letting him print The Silmarillion, which was much more dear to him.
  • In addition, he regretted writing The Hobbit as a children’s book, since he felt that he contributed to the false idea that fantasy is only for children. He also didn't like several of the touches he made to the story in the days when it wasn't meant to be overtly linked to Lord of the Rings, such as the trolls having English names and using modern slang.
• Douglas Adams suffered from terrible black moods, and the fourth and fifth installments of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (which tells you when he was thinking of ending it) are both missives at his fans constantly nagging him for a new book. Interestingly, they go about it in very different ways:
  • The fourth book, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, doesn't feel like a Hitchhiker's book at all, instead focusing mostly on Arthur and his new love life back on Earth. This was jarring for fans, who had grown accustomed to Arthur travelling the galaxy as an Unfazed Everyman and who also found it unconvincing that Earth could be a setting after its abrupt destruction in a bureaucratic tangle barely two chapters into the first book. Adams seemed to anticipate that fans wouldn't like the direction he was going, but he wanted to write something else, damn it — so midway through the book, he snaps at the reader and tells them that if they don't like where the book is going, they can skip to the end for a bit with fan-favourite character Marvin (but Marvin dies, while actually kind of not depressed, having finally proven his usefulness by reading out God's final message to creation). The last line of the book reads, "There was a point to this story but it has temporarily escaped the author's mind" — Adams once said that this was him "owning up". The book makes a cameo in an Interactive Fiction he wrote, Bureaucracy, as unsold merchandise in a bookstore's bargain bin.
  • By contrast, the fifth book, Mostly Harmless, feels much more like a Hitchhiker's book. It's also a depressing, nihilistic book in which Arthur's Relationship Upgrade in the previous book is undone off-screen, the Guide is taken over by really Corrupt Corporate Executives, and it has an "Everybody Dies" Ending where Earth is irrevocably destroyed in all universes, making any more books impossible. Adams came to regret ending the series on such a depressing note and was in the early stages of writing a sixth book that would have fixed everything, but sadly died before he could finish it. Bits of it were posthumously published as part of The Salmon of Doubt. Both the radio adaptation (as the "Quintessential Phase") and the sequel-by-other-hands And Another Thing... also revised the Downer Ending to something more optimistic (in different ways), although it's not entirely clear how much either of them lined up with Adams' unfinished plans.
• L. Frank Baum resented writing sequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and repeatedly tried to end the Oz series altogether. Several books end with firm declarations that he has told the reader everything there is to know about Oz, or that Oz has cut itself off from the rest of the world, and he can no longer give the reader new stories as a result. Yet Baum's other books never sold well, and for strictly financial reasons he was forced to repeatedly return to the tired franchise.
• Subverted by Vladimir Nabokov, most famous for Lolita, who said in a interview with Playboy magazine that while he felt that it overshadowed his other, more deserving works, "he'll never regret Lolita."
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe came to regret, and, for a time, disowned The Sorrows of Young Werther, partially because he regretted putting the personal issues it was based on in the public light, partially out of general embarrassment with the romantic movement, and partially out of annoyance with its obsessive fandom.
• Andrzej Sapkowski has come to utterly despise The Witcher, due to both his disagreement with the direction CD Projeck RED has taken the series, and anger over the series being the only thing most people remember him for.
• "Ode an die Freude" ("Ode to Joy", now best known in its choral setting as one movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony) has been popular ever since it was first written by Friedrich Schiller in 1785. But fifteen years after its publication, he wrote a letter to his friend Körner saying he regarded the ode as a failure, calling it "detached from reality" and "of value maybe to us two, but not for the world, nor for the art of poetry".
• Charlaine Harris wanted to end The Southern Vampire Mysteries with Dead and Gone but was effectively forced by her publishers to continue the series due to the ongoing popularity of True Blood. This, combined with the fact many fans confused the series with her books, resulted in her getting increasingly fed up with it. Some people believe this is why the final books were so harsh and against the characters.
• H. P. Lovecraft disliked much of his work, particularly Herbert West — Reanimator, which he did mainly to pay the bills. He wasn't much of a fan of The Horror at Red Hook either, and once described The Call of Cthulhu as "middling" and "full of cheap and cumbrous touches". He also burnt virtually everything he'd written when he was young. This one might've been a good call, as the few fragments which escaped the fireplace probably didn't deserve to.
• The Thorn Birds author Colleen McCullough disliked the character of Meggie, despite her having several of her own characteristics.
  "Can you imagine writing a novel and hating your heroine?"
• The 1978 book How To Be Your Dog's Best Friend is a non-fiction book designed to help train dogs. It popularized the "alpha roll", which involves rolling a dog into its back to prove your dominance over it. The concept has long since been debunked, as it was based on wolf dynamics involving unrelated captive wolves in an unnatural pack dynamic. The second edition of the book from 2002 notes this and discourages using it because it's dangerous and is used too often by people, when it was originally a last-resort technique.
• Gabriel García Márquez talked about his displeasure that he got international fame for writing One Hundred Years of Solitude and his dislike for what many critics consider as the greatest novel in Latin American literature. His dislike for it stems for how it overshadowed the rest of his work, how critics and intellectuals have praised it without understanding it properly, how it brought him unwanted amounts of fame, and lastly, how he considers his other novels to be far superior to it.
• William March considered his 1954 novel The Bad Seed to be thoroughly mediocre, though it is his best-known and most praised novel today.
• Ryder Windham, mostly known for his work on Star Wars books and comics, was hired as a freelancer for LEGO's BIONICLE (2015) books and comics. While he didn't disown any of his own works, he did complain about the series' inept handling and the lack of creative guidelines. Half the characters he had to write for had no personality, gender or even name, and the story outlines he had to work into his second book contradicted the continuity of the first because LEGO failed to inform him about the story direction. When addressing these complaints to LEGO, Windham was told to sort them out himself.
• A mild example occurred with P.C. and Kristin Cast in regards to The House of Night series (which P.C. wrote and Kristin helped edit). In the early 2020s, the Casts publicly acknowledged the criticism that the early House of Night books (which were first published in 2007) contained "a lot of slut shaming and other offensive and problematic language", with Kristin Cast referring to it as "cringeworthy and ignorant" in an Instagram post, and that they were working with publishers to revise future e-book editions so that this content was less prevalent.
• Tamora Pierce
  • Alanna's romantic partners in Song of the Lioness quartet had a very 80s case of Stalking is Love, especially George, the one she settled down with. On seeing its reviews by non-nostalgic readers, Pierce realized just how poorly that aspect had aged.
  • After seeing how eagerly fans responded to Word of Gay characters like Lalasa and Tian, Pierce realized that it did queer fans a disservice to keep using Hide Your Gays and resolved that any such characters would have their sexualities plainly stated in her future works.
• William Powell, the author of the original Anarchist Cookbook, released a statement on Amazon that expressed his regrets of writing the Cookbook and his desires to take the book out of print. The "recipes" in the Cookbook are outdated and any inevitably futile attempt to replicate the "recipes" contained can result in a hospital visit and possible felony/terrorism charges.
• Robert A. Heinlein:
  • His first novel, For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs , was written around 1939. It was not published, and Heinlein attempted to destroy every copy of it. He failed. It was published posthumously in 2004. Some people think it would have been better had he succeeded. In this case, it was his younger self's politics that he was ashamed of, not his writing.
  • In addition, of the short stories Heinlein published under the pen-name "Lyle Monroe," Heinlein requested that the "stinkeroo three" of "Beyond Doubt," "'My Object All Sublime'," and "Pied Piper" not be reprinted.
• Terry Pratchett wrote The Carpet People in his non-PC youth. His approach to this Old Shame was to re-write and re-publish it to be in line with his current morals.
  • He also wasn't too fond of the first Discworld book, revealed when he confirmed that the completely different Ankh-Morpork Patrician in it is the same character as Vetinari, just "written by someone much less talented".
  • In his introduction to "The Hades Business", his first published short story, in the collection Once More With Footnotes, Terry comments "Aargh. If I stick my fingers in my ears, I can't hear you reading this."
  • He also expressed regret over not being able to completely rewrite the stories in The Dragons at Crumbling Castle, all written when he was a teenager.
• A gem from Thomas Pynchon's introduction to Slow Learner, a compilation of his early short stories: "My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon."
• Flann O'Brien couldn't find a publisher willing to release his novel The Third Policeman, causing him to believe that it was no good and claim to his friends that he lost the manuscript. It was eventually published the year after his death and went on to become his most popular book.
• This was George Orwell's attitude toward his novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying and A Clergyman's Daughter, which he wrote for mostly contractual reasons. He also destroyed several unpublished novels he wrote in the 1920s before he adopted the pen name of "George Orwell" (his real name was Eric Arthur Blair).
• Nasu Kinoko refuses to re-publish Mahou Tsukai No Yoru - Witch on the Holy Night despite fan pleas to do so (since only five copies were ever made), mainly due to embarrassment over "bad writing". His feelings about other old works seem to be similar. He seems to have gotten over this in the case of Witch on the Holy Night as it was released in the form of an all-ages visual novel in April 2012.
• Neal Stephenson was fine with letting his first novel The Big U stay out of print until people started spending hundreds of dollars for copies on eBay. He let it be republished because he felt the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it. His later books don't list it in his bibliography.
• At a Sandman convention in 2004, Neil Gaiman was the guest auctioneer for a charity auction. One of the items was his first book ever published, a biography of the group Duran Duran. He grew so embarrassed and ashamed of it while he was on stage that he temporarily passed the auctioneer duties over to Charles Vess because Neil said that there were simply some things that couldn't be sold in good conscience. Vess quickly attempted to run up the bidding price on the book by declaring that Neil would sign it if the bidding got over $1,000, which drew quite a horrified reaction from Neil himself. He later remarked that he was a little less ashamed of it after a chance encounter with Simon le Bon, who had exclaimed "Oh, we liked that one!" when Gaiman confessed to having written it.
• Edward "The Monkey Wrench Gang" Abbey's first novel, Jonathan Troy, was published in 1954 in an edition of 5000 copies; he repudiated it at once, and it has never been reprinted. The cheapest copy currently available through Amazon Marketplace is priced at $749.99 (plus $3.99 shipping).
• Dr. Seuss was said to have destroyed the majority of his work because he was displeased with it. One notable book that was published posthumously is Daisy-Head Mayzie, which really wasn't up to par with some of his other work.
  • Before that, he felt so much regret for the racist anti-Japanese cartoons he drew during World War II that he dedicated Horton Hears a Who! to a Japanese friend, writing the story as an allegory for the US occupation of post-WWII Japan. Certain anti-racism activists attempted to bury his legacy just because of these drawings... to say they weren't met with a good response would be a massive understatement.
  • In 2021, the Seuss Foundation chose to withdraw six titles^note  And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, On Beyond Zebra!, If I Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super, McElligot's Pool, and The Cat's Quizzer from publication because they contained racially insensitive imagery and text. Predictably, there were public cries of censorship and Political Overcorrectness, even though it was the foundation themselves who voluntarily chose to withdraw the titles because they felt the titles were no longer appropriate for children.
• According to numerous articles made during Noddy's 60th Anniversary in 2009. Enid Blyton's daughters and granddaughters are deeply ashamed with the Golliwogs who were recurring characters. In later editions, scenes featuring◊ them were redrawn with goblins◊, toy monkeys, and other toys.
• The Spy Who Loved Me was an experiment on Ian Fleming's part. Unlike the other James Bond novels, the book focuses on the Bond Girl. Fleming grew to regret that move. When the producers of the film series sought the rights, he only let them have the name, preferring In Name Only to having it brought to the screen. Interestingly, many Fleming fans consider it one of his best works, in large part because it departs so radically from his typical approach.
• Philip Pullman states on his website that he hates the first novel he ever wrote and refuses to even name it so people can't track it down. (It's The Haunted Storm.)
• Lynne Cheney, wife of former US vice-president Dick Cheney, tried to convince the publisher of her 1981 novel, Sisters, not to reissue it in 2006. Given the sexual content (including a lesbian affair) of the book, she was afraid political opponents of her husband would use it to stir up controversy. In the end, The Daily Show ran with it, mostly learning about it from her attempts to keep it secret.
• Sergej Dowlatov, an emigrant from Russia, forbade all his work made in USSR from being reprinted. He then wrote a novel, Compromiss, to show why (most of his previous writing was heavily modified by Soviet censorship).
• Stanisław Lem said that his first sci-fi novel, The Astronauts, lacked any value. The shame was not about its being sci-fi, but about its being Communist propaganda. He wrote it for the money.
• Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis, a British design studio who created famous album covers for bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin between the late '60s and the early '80s, deal with this trope imaginatively in their retrospective book For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipgnosis. In the introduction to the (nearly) complete list of their covers at the back of the book, they admit that "There are some designs we would rather like to forget altogether"; within the list, these are marked with an icon of a turkey.
• Alastair Reynolds included an afterword in Galactic North admitting that his Revelation Space novels are derived in part from a much more space-opera-ish set of unpublished novels which he devoutly intends should never see print, although he regards them as a valuable learning experience.
• Dean Koontz spent the seventies writing straight science fiction under his real name, and several other genres including romance under various pseudonyms. Since becoming a bestselling author, he has refused to let many of these early novels be reprinted. One of the most infamous of these is The Funhouse, a novelization of a decent but forgettable slasher flick, written under the pseudonym Owen West. The book was so terrible that when he was unable to prevent it from being republished under his real name, he wrote a lengthy introduction decrying how terrible the book is and about how he likes to imagine the life that particular pseudonym took on after its publication ending very violently soon after its completion (namely, trampled by wildebeests while on safari).
• Orson Scott Card refuses to reprint his short story "Happy Head" in any form, and urges his fans to "think of it as something written by an earnest young graduate student rather than anything I did."
• Saul Bellow burned the manuscript of his first, unpublished novel The Very Dark Trees and refused to divulge any details about it throughout his life.
• Nancy Mitford did not allow her third novel, Wigs on the Green, to be republished in her lifetime—partly because the Fascism-praising heroine was based on her sister Unity, who had a self-inflicted bullet lodged in her brain when Germany declared war on the UK, and died a very slow, lingering death.
• David Eddings - "I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it." He later burnt the unfinished manuscript for his pre-fantasy novel Hunseeker's Ascent, a mountain climbing adventure, saying it was, "a piece of tripe so bad it even bored me."
• The introduction to "A Restoration of Faith" (the first story Jim Butcher ever wrote to be set in The 'Verse of The Dresden Files) is very much full of Self-Deprecation and Butcher mocking how sophomoric the story is and reflective of him having written it when he was a first-time college student. Additionally, Butcher has been very dismissive towards the first few novels in the series (Storm Front and Fool Moon in particular), and he has openly advised new fans to start with Dead Beat since he feels that it's the best entry point for new people to get into the books.
• Brandon Sanderson apparently once tried to write an epic poem in the style of Beowulf called Wyrn The King—and it was pretty awful. Being rather self-aware about this, he made the poem an in-universe document in Elantris—as the national epic of the oppressive, theocratic Fjordell Empire.
• On March 17, 1994, Dave Barry wrote a jocularly profane message to a reporter who wanted to interview him and accidentally wound up posting it to the Usenet group alt.fan.dave_barry instead of sending it by private e-mail. This became legendary around the Internet as the "Chuckletrousers" post. Several days later, the reporter, Michael Bywater, posted to the same newsgroup complaining that he had been forwarded 2,038 copies of the message and didn't want any more. This embarrassing incident is recounted in Dave Barry in Cyberspace.
• According to anecdote, if you saw Harlan Ellison at a signing and innocently presented a certain book^note Doomsman, he would destroy it and pay you for it.
• Boston poet Gelett Burgess wrote a poem in 1895 entitled "Purple Cow." Two years later, the poem's popularity prompted him to write a follow-up entitled "Confession: and a Portrait Too, Upon a Background that I Rue," which currently supplies the main page quote.
• Play Dead by Harlan Coben has an author's note in the beginning saying that it's his first novel, written in his early twenties, and also that, if anyone reading the note hasn't read his other books, to put this book back on the shelf in the bookstore and go buy one of them instead.
• Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote several of these, mostly in The '60s, with titles like I am a lesbian or My Sister, My Love. Warrior Woman also has a lot of fanservice with lesbians.
• In 1950 Louis L'Amour was hired to write four novels about the western character Hopalong Cassidy as a tie-in with the very popular TV show. Since Hopalong was not an original character, restrictions were placed on him in order to align the books with the TV show. L'Amour was not happy with these stories and later in his career would deny ever writing them, even to his own family.
• Mark Gatiss has The King's Men, which is gay porn with much purple prose.
• Highly literary British author Martin Amis was putting together his first big hit, Money, and was running short of cash. So he dashed off Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict's Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines - a guide to early arcade games... a distinctly odd guide to early arcade games. The book is mentioned nowhere in his biography and he doesn't talk about it. Ever.
• Years after it was published, Salman Rushdie looks back on his 1975 novel Grimus with disgust. The novel (about a Native American who tries to find the secret to eternal life) was critically acclaimed but remained a commercial failure. When asked about it, he said that, since this was his first novel, his writing style was undeveloped and virtually unlike anything he had written afterward.
• Whenever it's mentioned on his forum on Baen's Bar, Tom Kratman always strongly recommends against reading his A State of Disobedience, particularly as an initial introduction to his writing. It's not his first novel, as some think, but it thanks in part to Executive Meddling by Jim Baen he identifies it as his weakest work.
• Israeli television host Asi Azar once hosted a short-lived satirical talk show named Talk to My Agent that brutally poked fun at Israeli celebrities, aided by his Cloud Cuckoolander 'agent' 'Miley Levy' (played by Dudi Cohen) and actress No'a Wohlmann serving as a Dumb Blonde 'reporter' of sort, and two actors doing impressions of various celebrities. One episode had Levy and Wohlmann telling him about the horrible thing that will happen to him at the end of the show, without telling him what it was... At the end, they told the audience of a page on New Stage, a website for young and aspiring artists to publish their works, featuring Azar's 'incredibly premature' juvenalia. They even read a few lines from a poem of his and a few more from one of his short stories. They provided the address, at which Azar rejoiced, as he thought most people probably didn't write it down; Wohlmann, however, said that people could just Google 'Asi Azar' and 'New Stage' to find his works. Fortunately, Azar took it all in good sport. (And just in case you were wondering, his works weren't as bad as they tried to present them, but they've been removed from the site anyway.)
• One of J. R. R. Tolkien's earliest works was the poem "Goblin Feet," which exemplified the twee cutesy style of fantasy that the mature Tolkien abhorred. Of it, he said: "I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever."
• Kenneth Oppel's debut was Colin's Fantastic Video Adventure, but the book is long out of print and is barely mentioned on his official website, while all his other books get their own page.^*The only other book to get this treatment is The Devil's Cure, a thriller that is his only work for adults to date. Probably to avoid kids looking it up.
• In an inversion, Arthur C. Clarke refused to reread Rescue Party, not because he worried it was too bad, but because he worried it was too good, and would make his work since feel uncomfortably stagnant. In a straight example, he eventually became embarrassed by the paranormal/mystical elements of Childhood's End.
• Henrik Ibsen's collected works mark a gap in the years between 1850 (Catilina) and 1856 (The Feast at Solhaug). In those years, he actually wrote three plays, which he later omitted from his collection. One of them, St John's Eve, is interesting because Ibsen turned his back on it after a hard critical backlash. He initially meant the play was good, but then his audience meant otherwise. The play in question was later Vindicated by History, but not until 1978. The other two plays, Olaf Lilywreath and The Giant's Mound, are also performed in later years.
• Averted by Isaac Asimov, who published as much of his early work as he could find (excluding his robot series and the Foundation series, both of which had already appeared in compilations) in a two-volume collection, The Early Asimov. Some of it is pretty cheesy, and at least one story was so bad that this was its first publication. He also included notes about his stories for which he had lost the manuscripts, implying that he would have included them otherwise. He was uncomfortable with people calling Nightfall (1941) his greatest work, not because he thought it was bad, but because he wrote it at the age of 21, and he didn't like the implication that he peaked that early in a fifty-plus-year career as a writer.
• The Divine Comedy has an In-Universe and MetaFictional example: when the Pilgrim Dante encounters the adulterous couple Francesca and Paolo in Hell, they explain that they began their affair after reading romantic poetry about Gueneviere and Lancelot—poetry that Dante himself had written in Real Life. In other words, Dante was using his masterpiece condemning sin to condemn himself for having once glorified it.
• Peter Benchley, the writer of the novel Jaws (its 1975 film adaptation is better known now), regrets writing it, not because it was bad, but because the book and movie gave people a very bad impression of sharks. In Real Life, sharks don't like eating human flesh and rarely attack humans, with almost all attacks that do happen being a result of the shark mistaking a human for another animal that is in its diet, while animals like bees, cows, dogs, horses, and hippos kill far more people every year. However, the movie helped to create the stereotype that sharks are vicious animals that prey on people, which made people afraid of them and led to many sharks being killed. Benchley went on to become an activist for the conservation of sharks.
• As popular as Thomas the Tank Engine is, many stories in The Railway Series have fallen victim to this:
  • The original text of "Henry's Sneeze" stated that Henry's "sneeze" of coal dust and soot left the schoolboys dropping rocks on trains "black as niggers". Wilbert Awdry rewrote this later in the 1970s after backlash in the press.
  • Awdry stated James the Red Engine to be his least favourite work due to being written hastily to meet a deadline.
  • Christopher Awdry was unsatisfied with the book More About Thomas the Tank Engine. The Awdrys had been pushed to publish more stories starring Thomas to coincide with the TV show and give it more adaptation material. Christopher Awdry found the final result rushed and disliked the final story "Drip Tank" due to the use of now outdated slang as a plot pivot. Noticeably "Drip Tank" is the only story of the book not adapted into a TV episode.
• Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Donald Trump's 1987 memoir/advice book Trump: The Art of the Deal, regrets having ever written it. He felt that his work on the book helped create the image of Trump as a master businessman and deal-maker that ultimately propelled him to the White House, even though Schwartz regarded him as a Corrupt Corporate Executive and a pathological liar who didn't belong anywhere near politics, and felt that he had to struggle to portray him in a positive light. In 2016, when Trump ran for President, Schwartz pledged all of his royalties from the book to liberal charities opposed to Trump's politics. When asked what The Art of the Deal would look like if he wrote it today, he responded that he would've titled it The Sociopath.
  "I put lipstick on a pig. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is. I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization."
• Daryush "Roosh V" Valizadeh first gained notoriety as a pick-up artist with his controversial Bang series of books meant to serve as guides to getting laid in various countries, which were widely criticized for their dismissal of ideas of sexual consent. In 2019, upon converting to Christianity, he renounced his career as a pick-up artist, pulling the Bang books from his online store and banning members of his forum who attempted to discuss or promote the tips within them.
• As of 2018; the book I Kissed Dating Goodbye is this to its author, Joshua Harris. Harris, in his early 20s at the time the book was released, promoted the return to courtship as an alternative to the modern dating system - which (along with the True Love Waits abstinence program that had begun not long before the book's release) popularized what became known in some circles as "purity culture" in evangelical Christian circles. However, Harris^note who as early as 2007 expressed worries that some had taken what he wrote in a legalistic direction publicly rejected his writings to the degree of requesting the book be taken out of print; subsequently disclosing in consecutive weeks in July 2019 that he and wife Shannon^note whose courtship and marriage were the subject of Harris' 2000 follow-up "Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship" were getting a divorce and that Harris had rejected Christianity altogether.
• Ursula K. Le Guin came to regard some of her earlier fantasy and sci-fi works with a highly critical eye. Though always a feminist, her depiction of women in the first three Earthsea novels can be summed up with the in-universe maxim "weak as women's magic, wicked as women's magic," with no thought of actually questioning such attitudes—it was just genre convention, and the eighteen-year gap between the third and fourth books had a lot to do with her coming to grips with this. The fourth book onwards then turned to examining Earthsea's oppressive attitudes towards women. She also regretted treating "male" as always the default gender in The Left Hand of Darkness.
• V. C. Andrews once said that before her first published novel Flowers in the Attic, she had completed several manuscripts, including one "so shocking and full of sex" that she hid it away for fear of what her family would think. Many, many fans suspect that My Sweet Audrina was that book.
• Jenna Moreci gives off the impression that Eve: The Awakening has become this for her; while Eve is still mentioned on her website she never brings it up on her vlogs anymore (while frequently discussing and promoting her newer books) and she appears to have abandoned the idea of writing sequels. It also appears the book is no longer being printed; on Amazon you can only buy used physical copies or the e-book.
• The last mention of Save the Pearls on Victoria Foyt's website was in 2019. Currently, all references to them in that section have since been removed even though a book Foyt published before them is still listed. Whether Foyt has come to agree with her critics about the duology's Unfortunate Implications or simply knows the series hurts her reputation (especially since they were unlisted a year before she published her next book) is anyone's best guess.
• Rosemary Tonks was a 1960s poet and novelist with a somewhat avant garde style, who then became a fundementalist Christian and believed that all books apart from the King James Bible were the work of Satan, her own most definitely included.
• Patricia Highsmith declared her Mockstery Tale A Game For the Living to be her own least favourite work, stating that despite the Genre Deconstruction involved she felt that she simply wasn't good at writing crime stories from any point of view other than a perpetrator's.
• According to Reki Kawahara, he wasn't particularly fond of many of the sexual assault scenes in Sword Art Online^note a sentiment that the fanbase shares with him and came to realize how needlessly cruel and tasteless they were. He also said he would use other plot devices over rape as a driving force for Kirito to stop the villain in future installments. This can explain why the controversial sexual assault scene in the Alicization arc was the last instance of such in the series.
• Haganai author Yomi Hirasaka is said to have begun to despise the series the more he wrote it, feeling that it wasn't very fun or interesting to write, and as such had the characters make very stupid, annoying decisions in the later novels that caused an outcry from many fans. This has led many to wish that if the anime adaptation ever gets a third season, that it would stray from the source material in favor of a more likeable continuation.
• Unsurprisingly, Kaavya Viswanathan isn't fond of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life and has expressed a wish to put it all behind her and not be solely defined by it, especially considering that the first thing that often comes up when you Google Viswanathan's name is the plagiarism debacle.

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