Post from the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog.
Editor's note: Link's content reproduced below,
From Evangelical Textual Criticism: John Updike and the Problem of the Original Text, originally published February 20, 2009.
John Updike and the Problem of the Original Text
by Peter M. Head at 17:09
Perhaps we ought to admit that sometimes 'the original text' is a slippery notion. In the aftermath of John Updike's recent death the Times re-published his foreword to the latest edition of his Rabbit, Run. In this foreword Updike discloses some of the complicated history of the publication of this great American novel. (For an entertaining guide to his theology try here). The following texts can be discerned:
a) The handwritten draft completed on 11 September 1959.
b) The typescript sent to his publisher
c) The American Knopf edition of 1960 (minus various excisions from the typescript)
d) A UK reprint of the Knopf text in 1962
e) A Penguin edition of 1962 with excisions restored and improvements to the prose throughout
f) Various reprints of that edition
g) Another edition in 1995 with " few further corrections and improvements for this printing".
These are all authorial texts (although variously constrained by lawyers and editors), but I'm not sure which one is the original text. In reflecting on this situation he says: "Rabbit, Run, in keeping with its jittery, indecisive protagonist, exists in more forms than any other novel of mine." In other words somehow there is a coherence between the nature of the story and its characters, and the complications of its text.
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