Famous Authors Who Disowned Their Own Books

Why do authors reject their own books? In the case of Stephen King's Carrie, he got frustrated writing it, and thought it was no good. Bad reviews are another source of rejection. But in nearly all cases, it's because the books did not meet the author's own expectations. Writers are their own harshest critics.

(Of course, I expected that Kafka would have ordered all of his works to be burned - that is sooo Kafka-esque - but Ian Fleming?)
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Examples taken from: 13 Writers Who Grew to Hate Their Own Books by Emily Temple

10 Great Authors Who Disowned Their Own Books by Madeleine Monson-Rosen and Charlie Jane Anders

1) Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me

Fleming wrote this novel, in which James Bond is basically a secondary character, in an attempt to caution his readers against making Bond into too much of a hero. Fleming said he wanted to make Bond's misogyny apparent after being shocked to discover that his Bond novels were being taught in schools.

This "experiment," Fleming wrote to his publisher after the book received overwhelmingly negative reviews, had "obviously gone very much awry," and Fleming attempted to keep the book out of print. After Fleming's death, however, the value of his backlist overwhelmed the author's wishes, and The Spy Who Loved Me came back into print.

2) Octavia Butler, Survivor

This 1978 novel is the only one of Butler's works to remain out of print. She disowned it and let it stay buried, because she felt it depended on the worst cliches of science fiction:

When I was young, a lot of people wrote about going to another world and finding either little green men or little brown men, and they were always less in some way. They were a little sly, or a little like "the natives" in a very bad, old movie. And I thought, "No way. Apart from all these human beings populating the galaxy, this is really offensive garbage." 

People ask me why I don't like Survivor, my third novel. And it's because it feels a little bit like that. Some humans go up to another world, and immediately begin mating with the aliens and having children with them. I think of it as my Star Trek novel.

While Butler never stopped using science fiction tropes as allegories, she stayed away from the stereotypes invoked in Survivor after that.

3) Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“A novel I am prepared to repudiate” is how Burgess described A Clockwork Orange in his biography of another misunderstood novelist, D.H. Lawrence. Like many artists whose reputations become totally connected to one work, Burgess was frustrated that he was known only for A Clockwork Orange, which he claimed to have written in just three weeks. 

Some accounts claim that it was the film version and its popularity that made Burgess hate his own work so much. The “misunderstanding” represented by the film’s seeming to “glorify sex and violence” will “pursue me until I die,” he wrote.

4) The Haunted Storm by Philip Pullman 

Pullman was 25 when his first novel was “published by a publisher who didn’t realise it wasn’t a very good book”. Violence and death in a small village form the backdrop of the book, narrated by Matthew Cortez, an investigator with spiritual problems. Despite it being joint winner of the New English Library’s Young Writer’s Award the year it was published, Pullman has refused to discuss the novel and had erased it from his entry in Who’s Who. Incidentally, it got the lowest reading on Goodreads, where it was described as a "Turgid and weird romance between self-indulgent, self-obsessed, unattractive and tedious dramatis personae. I really would not bother with it, especially given the prices being fetched by this now Pullman groupie collectors' item book."

5) J.G. Ballard, The Wind from Nowhere 

The plot of this book is contained entirely in the title: A wind from nowhere blows worldwide. It blows with increasing force until people are living in tunnels and basements, unable to go above ground. Near the end, "The air stream carried with it enormous quantities of water vapour — in some cases the contents of entire seas, such as the Caspian and the Great Lakes, which had been drained dry, their beds plainly visible." In a 1975 interview, Ballard admitted to writing his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1961), entirely out of clichés, for much-needed money, and “as a conscious attempt to break into the paperback market.” He had a job at the time, so he was pressed for time. "I had this fortnight’s holiday coming up, and my wife as a joke said—we hadn’t enough money to go away—”why don’t you write a novel in a fortnight?” So I thought: “Good, that’s sensible talking. So I thought I’d use all the clichés there are, the standard narrative conventions, and I sat down at the typewriter and I wrote the book. Six thousand words a day, which is quite a lot." Ballard later dismissed the novel as a "piece of hackwork"referring instead to The Drowned World as his first real novel. (The reviews on Goodreads are predictably tongue-in-cheek: "This book sure gives you wind! Yes, yes, I read this book just to be able to crack this joke." "This book blows.")

6) Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain

Like Anthony Burgess, the source of Annie Proulx's dissatisfaction with her story is the fame it garnered after it had been turned into a movie. “I wish I’d never written the story,” Annie Proulx told the Paris Review. “It’s just been the cause of hassle and problems and irritation since the film came out. … So many people have completely misunderstood the story. I think it’s important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience, but unfortunately the audience that Brokeback reached most strongly have powerful fantasy lives. And one of the reasons we keep the gates locked here is that a lot of men have decided that the story should have had a happy ending … So they rewrite the story … I can’t tell you how many of these things have been sent to me as though they’re expecting me to say, ‘Oh great, if only I’d had the sense to write it that way.’”

7) William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook 

William Powell wrote his cult classic (which includes instructions for building and planting bombs, cooking tear gas and making your own silencer) as a teenager a the height of the Vietnam War. He says the book was a "misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in. The central idea was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I am not in agreement with the contents of The Anarchist Cookbook, and I would be very pleased (and relieved) to see its publication discontinued. I consider it a misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print." The Anarchist Cookbook has 4,321 overwhelmingly positive ratings on Amazon. 

8) Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanshawe (1828)

Hawthorne’s first novel was a short self-published novel based on his own experiences as an undergraduate at Bowdoin College. There were a few copies sold,” his sister Elizabeth explained, “and he gave me one; but afterwards he took possession of it, and no doubt burned it. We were enjoined to keep the authorship a profound secret, and of course we did, with one or two exceptions.” Hawthorne did indeed burn the manuscript, and even went so far as to deny writing it at all. In a letter a friend, he wrote:

"You make an inquiry about some supposed former publication of mine. I cannot be sworn to make correct answers as to all the literary or other follies of my nonage; and I earnestly recommend you not to brush away the dust that may have gathered over them. Whatever might do me credit you may be pretty sure I should be ready enough to bring forward. Anything else it is to our mutual interest to conceal; and so far from assisting your researches in that direction, I especially enjoin on you, my dear friend, not to read any unacknowledged page that you may suppose to be mine."

9) Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick

While Vonnegut never went so far as to deny having written Slapstick, or burned it, or insisted that it be taken out of print, he did assign it a letter grade of D. Slapstick is a book about loneliness, at both the personal and societal level. It is dedicated to Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy (better known as Laurel and Hardy).  Vonnegut explains the title himself in the opening lines of the book's prologue:

"This is the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography. I have called it "Slapstick" because it is grotesque, situational poetry -- like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy, of long ago. It is about what life feels like to me."

Indeed, Vonnegut struggled with depression throughout his life, and attempted suicide in 198. 

10) Kafka, almost everything

Kafka is so famous, he has been turned into an adjective. His most famous work, The Metamorphosis, has become the quintessential expression of modern alienation. Of equal stature, The Penal Colony, written in 1914, was a frighteningly accurate depiction of Eichmann's role in creating the Holocaust. (I maintain that Kafka, like other "prescient" writers, was not so much ahead of his times as entirely with them, in a way most people, who are inured to the present by being caught up in the mythology of the past, aren't.)

When, a few years before his death, Kafka asked his good friend Max Brod to destroy all his papers, besides the few short works with which Kafka was satisfied, Brod responded, “If you seriously think me capable of such a thing, let me tell you here and now that I shall not carry out your wishes.” Nevertheless, when Kafka died he left Brod a letter asking him to destroy his fiction, diaries, and correspondence. Brod remained true to his word: he proceeded to publish everything he could get his hands on.