10 Great Literary Works That Almost Had Terrible Titles

When it comes to a great piece of literature, what’s in a title? Actually, quite a lot: whether as straightforward as Dracula, as cryptic as Lord of the Flies, or as devastating as The Waste Land, the title of a literary work functions as our entry point into it.

But so many great literary works we know today might never have achieved mainstream success if their authors had had their way. An array of poems, plays, and novels that are still read and performed the world over once had completely different titles, ones which the author pushed for but editors, publishers, time, and fate managed to dispel. Because who would have read Whacking Off, Trimalchio in West Egg, or He Do the Police in Different Voices?

Related: 10 Poorly Written Books That People Still Love

10 James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice

Setting the tone and standard for every U.S. crime novel to follow, James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice roared onto the scene in the 1930s. In the book, a drifter rolls into town and takes up a job at a diner, where he falls for the boss’s wife and begins planning the murder that will allow them to be together.
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Every twist of fate is mapped to perfection in Cain’s novel, but the element he couldn’t seem to get right was the title. Cain had titled the work “Bar-B-Q,” and his publisher, Alfred Knopf, hated it. When chatting with playwright Vincent Lawrence, Lawrence mentioned that, when stuck at home, he noticed the postman always rang twice—Cain found a fresh idea.

Knopf was not impressed by this ungainly string of words and pressed for his own title pick: For Love Or Money instead. However, Cain stuck to his guns, and Knopf backed down, considering it fair that they had rejected one of each other’s titles. And lucky he did, given the new title became one of the most famous in 20th-century literature.^[1]

9 Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice

One of the most adored novels of not just the 19th century but across the entire history of the novel, Pride and Prejudice has captured hearts and minds the world over for generations. Today, it continues to be adapted, imitated, parodied, and doted on by an unwavering fanbase.

The book follows Elizabeth Bennett as her parents attempt to find her an ideal match in Regency England. She comes into the orbit of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, a brooding member of the landed gentry. Despite Elizabeth’s initial distaste for him, she can’t help but fall in love.

Although Jane Austen first drafted the novel as a series of letters in 1796, it wasn’t published until 1813—and not for a lack of trying. Austen and her father petitioned various publishers under the title First Impressions, to no avail. It wasn’t until Sense and Sensibility was released and a name change that publishers took notice. And nobody can deny that Pride and Prejudice is far more fitting, given Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy are forced to overcome both pride and prejudice to provide the book’s romantic narrative and happily ever after.^[2]

8 T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

One of the most important poems of the 20th century, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land captures life in London following the devastation of the First World War through an array of perspectives. The poem is divided into five sections and uses these to pair portraits of real lives with the fallout and miseries of the war, all wrapped up in grand themes of tragedy, disillusionment, and despair.

No title more fitting, then, than The Waste Land. And we can only consider in horror that he nearly named the poem “He Do the Police in Different Voices.”

Eliot’s working title was hideous but with a cogent intertextual referent. It suggests Charles Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend, in which the character Betty Higden says, “You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy [her adopted child] is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the police in different voices.” Granted, this ties into Eliot’s idea of presenting a multitude of voices and narrators within The Waste Land, but as a title, it is an absolute stinker.^[3]

7 Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities

Contemporary playwright Jon Robin Baitz has been involved in various plays and films from the late 20th century until now. However, few have captured modern, middle-class life quite like Other Desert Cities. In the play, a disparate family gathers in Palm Springs for Christmas and crumbles under the weight of each other’s secrets and company.

The play addresses generational politics, patriarchy, breakdowns, alcoholism, and all the other significant and yet small concerns that plague the American household. The play won acclaim off-Broadway before moving to Broadway. The director Roland Emmerich (who first read and then saw it) was so impressed that he hired Baitz to write the screenplay for Stonewall (2015) on the back of it.

But Baitz had originally called his masterwork Love and Mercy, a limp and unevocative title if there ever was one. It was late in the day after writing was completed that Baitz decided on Other Desert Cities, a phrase which had been in the script all along—referencing the sign on Interstate 10 directing drivers to destinations beyond Palm Springs—but which only caught his ear at the end.^[4]

6 Bram Stoker’s Dracula

A contender with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for both the most popular epistolary novel and most popular gothic novel of all time, Bram Stoker’s Dracula invented the title character, redefined the vampire, and opened the castle doors on over a century and a quarter (and counting) of vampire mania.

Set between the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania and the English seaside town of Whitby, Dracula brings an Eastern-European evil to Britain, as Count Dracula seeks a home with a whole new crop of unwitting victims to feast on. The book captured the minds and preyed on the fears of Victorian society, which spread far beyond the UK in the years following, influencing countless adaptations and iterations of its main character. But would this have been the case if the novel had gone by a different name?
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An over 500-page original manuscript of the text was discovered in a Pennsylvanian barn in 1980, with Stoker’s original title hand-written on its title page: The Un-Dead. Hardly a memorable name and so general, it would almost definitely have been lost to history, no matter how arresting the story.^[5]

5 Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint

While today’s most serious readers regard Philip Roth as one of the greatest writers of the past century, in the 1960s, he was still small potatoes. It wasn’t until the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 that Roth found critical acclaim and the widespread readership to go with it.

An unconventionally candid and explicit piece of fiction, the novel is presented as the tongue-in-cheek monologue of a lusty, young Jewish bachelor addressing his psychoanalyst. Its title is there on the first page, in the clinical definition of a fictional disorder, “in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses perpetually are warring with extreme sexual longings.” Fitting but a far cry from what Roth originally had in mind.

While not autobiographical per se, the writer mined his experiences as a young Jewish man in New Jersey and even called it The Jewboy in earlier drafts. He cycled through several dismal titles, including Whacking Off, before settling on Portnoy’s Complaint, when he had decided to frame the story as a psychotherapy session.^[6]

4 Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier

A classic of Modernist literature, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier tells the story of Edward Ashburnham (the “good soldier”) via unreliable narrator John Dowell through a series of non-linear flashbacks. The novel depicts the cracks in the men’s marriages, the lies, the affairs, and the untimely deaths of several characters.

Ford’s novel has stood the test of time, but his original title might have been the undoing of the whole project. He wanted to call it The Saddest Story, but because it coincided with World War I, his editor thought it best to go with something more topical and upbeat. Ford was unhappy by this requested change and suggested The Good Soldier as something of a joke—but it stuck.

Nevertheless, the first line of the published novel is, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” It’s unclear whether Ford included it as a substitute for his title being nixed or if this was the impetus for that first title. Still, in some sense, the writer got his way in the end.^[7]

3 William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

A coming-of-age novel quite unlike any other, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies puts a group of adolescent boys on a desert island and takes notes as they descend into tribal warfare, trying desperately to maintain the division between society and chaos. The title is a literal translation of the name of biblical demon Beelzebub and represents the pig’s head on a stick that one of the boys shares hallucinatory dialogues with.

The considerably less imaginative Strangers from Within was Golding’s original title for the piece. Letters with his novel’s editors reveal that they found this original title lacking, and a back and forth on title options began.

The editorial team floated a fair number of ideas that could have been considerably worse than Strangers from Within, including Island Refuge, Island Trouble, My Island and Coral Island Renewed. Luckily, editor Charles Monteith intervened and provided the now-immortal title drawn from the pages of the book itself.^[8]

2 Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire

When Tennessee Williams penned A Streetcar Named Desire, he was already a widely performed and celebrated playwright, but this work catapulted him to a level of stardom few writers ever achieve. The play follows withered and penniless Southern belle Blanche DuBois into working-class New Orleans, where she must endure her brutish brother-in-law in a desperate attempt to start a new life.

When it was adapted by Elia Kazan into a film starring Marlon Brando, Streetcar found itself on the lips of global audiences the theater could never reach, and it became a household name. Not bad, considering how thematically rich the title is—literally representing the streetcar that brings Blanche into town but symbolizing her tragic, desire-driven fate.

However, a remarkable lack of craft is revealed in Williams’s diaries and letters when titling his most famous works. The playwright went through a colorful array of names—including The Moth, The Primary Colors, and Blanche’s Chair in the Moon—before thankfully, landing on the enduring image that would define the play.^[9]

1 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the defining novel of the 1920s Jazz Age in America. It finds its story in the glamorous life of Long Island millionaire Jay Gatsby, who attempts to reconnect with a past love while inadvertently pinwheeling into disaster.

The title is simple, to the point, and captures the essence of the main character and pride before his fall. However, Fitzgerald went through a multitude of titles to arrive there. Among them were Under the Red, White and Blue, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, and the author’s favorite, Trimalchio in West Egg.

West Egg, of course, references the part of Long Island Gatsby lives on. However, Trimalchio is a little more complex, alluding to the character from Gaius Petronius’s The Satyricon: a boorish former slave, wealthy and extravagant but lacking in manners and substance. Fitzgerald adored the idea of having Trimalchio in his title, but his publisher did not, reckoning that the average reader wouldn’t understand it. And it’s hard to deny that they were right—Trimalchio in West Egg is absurd at best and not a book most readers would reach for on title alone.^[10]