5 Beloved Novels That Almost Had Very Different Endings

The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green
Anyone who has struggled to main their composure when reading the devastating, somehow inspiring ending of Green’s novel knows the death of Augustus, the co-lead and primary love interest of the main character, cancer-afflicted teen Hazel, hits hard. It’s a quiet, yet intense ending that fits perfectly with what comes before. But Green recently admitted that he had two other endings in mind, and in retrospect, both of them sound absolutely insane: in one, Peter Van Houten ties a character to railroad tracks in order to explore the philosophical puzzle known as the Trolley Problem, and in another, Van Houten and Hazel die together in a shootout with drug lords. Green was talked out of both ideas and settled on the tragic ending that so perfectly ends the story, and no, you’re tearing up thinking about it again, not us. Pass those tissues.

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
The final lines of Hemingway’s 1929 classic A Farewell to Arms are perfectly Hemingwayesque: “But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” The clipped rhythm, unadorned sentences, and bleakness: that’s Hemingway, all right. But in 1958, Papa admitted he’d struggled to find those words, and estimated he’d written 39 alternate endings before settling on the final version. Recent scholarship ups that to 47 distinct endings, all preserved in Hemingway’s papers—including one suggested by F. Scott Fitzgerald. A 2012 edition of the novel includes them all, and while only the final few lines are altered, the tone and implication of the ending is often completely transformed between variations.

Matilda, by Roald Dahl
Matilda is one of Dahl’s best-loved novels, the story of a precocious little girl whose intellectual prowess is stymied by schoolwork way beneath her abilities, triggering the development of temporary telekinesis, which she uses it to play pranks on the mean-spirited school headmistress and help her kind-hearted teacher, Miss Honey. The ending is a bit abrupt—Matilda’s awful parents are implicated in an elaborate fraud scheme and go on the run from the police, disinterestedly giving her permission to live with Miss Honey instead—but Dahl’s early manuscripts reveal a much darker ending in which Matilda dies. In that early version her pranks are a little meaner, as well, demonstrating an overall different tone.

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
Dickens actually revised the ending to this classic novel twice. The original ending had Pip meet Estella—but she has remarried after Drummle’s death, and thus there is no chance of a happy ending. Dickens liked this ending because it was unexpected and went against convention. However, he was persuaded its melancholy tone was uncommercial, so he altered it to something very close to the modern ending, wherein Estella is widowed but not remarried, and indicates she now sees Pip as a potential future. His final revision was to finesse the famous line “I saw no shadow of another parting from her” into its current form in order to make it slightly more ambiguous.

Rinkitink in Oz, by L. Frank Baum
Baum wrote 14 Oz books in his lifetime, and dozens of official entries in the series have been penned by others. Like many authors of successful series, Baum tried to do something different, only to come back to Oz because the books sold well. The 10th installment, Rinkitink in Oz, is often considered an outlier—albeit a very good one—because 90 percent of the story takes place outside of Oz; Dorothy only appears suddenly at the very end to give the heroes a tour of Oz. The reason for this is simple: it was originally written a decade earlier as a standalone fairy tale with no connection to Oz whatsoever. In need of a new Oz book and exhausted after a particularly busy few years of writing, Baum dusted off King Rinkitink, rewrote the ending with a bit of Ozness injected, and published it. The good news is, it’s one of the best stories in the series.
If John Green had gone with the shootout ending, would The Fault in Our Stars still be as beloved? Discuss below.