Carver had been up all night reviewing Lish’s severe editorial cuts wo stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten and he was unnerved to the point of desperation
More on Raymond Carver’s relationship with his friend and editor Gordon Lish at The New Yorker
In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (too racy) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (“hopelessly bad”).
More on Knopf’s rejection record at The NY Times
In fact, he [Jack Kerouac] revised the book [On The Road] many times before it was published six years later, and while the scroll came to symbolise the spontaneity of the Beat Generation, the early, unedited version never reached the public.
Read full article at The Sydney Morning Herald