Needs a Rewrite: Great Authors' First Draft Revisions

"Moby Dick"
Herman Melville

"Call me Ishmael."

"The Old Man and the Sea"
Ernest Hemingway

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulfstream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish."

"Pride and Prejudice"
Jane Austen

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

"Trees"
Joyce Kilmer

"I think that I shall never see/A poem as lovely as a tree."

"The Trial"
Franz Kafka

"Someone must have slandered Josef K . for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested for "

"Romeo and Juliet"
William Shakespeare

"But soft what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Julia is the sun

"Notes From Underground"
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man."

"Ulysses"
James Joyce

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."

"Mrs. Dalloway"
Virginia Woolf

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

"The Stranger"
Albert Camus

"Mother died today."

"A Tale of Two Cities"
Charles Dickens

"It was the best of times it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of Incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter, of despair."

"The Bell Jar"
Sylvia Plath

"It was a clear, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

"The Great Gatsby"
F. Scott Fitzgerald

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since